Labor Blacklist

[Anchor Lead]

Workers at the representative stores of Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group have been on a series of strikes recently. The automaker is suspected of meddling in the strikes by drafting a blacklist of rallying workers to put them at a disadvantage.

[Pkg]

Up until two years ago, this building housing a restaurant in Uijeongbu, Gyeonggi-do Province used to be home to a representative store of Hyundai Motor Group. When the store's temporary sales personnel joined a labor union at the time, the owner of the store gave them a warning.

[Soundbite] Fmr. Owner of Hyundai Motor Representative Store(Sept. 2015) : "The main office seems to be preparing measures against labor union members. If you have joined a labor union, you'd better quit it."

Later, the store was closed down, while about a dozen of its temporary sales workers who had joined the labor union lost their jobs. They tried to land jobs at nearby Kia Motors stores, but failed. One of the automaker's salesmen who has worked for the company for 13 years has been jobless since the Kia Motors store where he used to work was shut down after he joined a labor union.

[Soundbite] Seo Bong-won(Fmr. Salesman at Kia Motors Store) : "I tried hard to find a job at other stores, but I failed because all the stores had the blacklist."

Some say that the Hyundai-Kia headquarters pushed its representative stores to file lawsuits against their salespeople. The headquarters refused to recognize them as members of labor unions because they were not regular workers. The Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group has denied that its headquarters meddled in the employment contracts signed between its representative stores and sales personnel or drafted a blacklist of labor union members.