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64 K S E C W O R K E R S I N T H E 1 9 5 0 S hundred workers there in 1946, but still a substantial and potentially influential number, considering their relatively high positions and seniority. These skilled workers largely maintained control over production at the yard throughout the 1950s, and, as we shall see, well into the 1960s. The 1950s is remembered as the “era of foremen” by former technicians of the company.41 Newly hired collegeeducated engineers and managers tried to take away the foremen’s control over the production process and to restructure production, but they did not succeed during the 1950s (and even during the early 1960s). An important reason for the foremen’s dominance over production was the fact that the level of technological and managerial sophistication was low at the yard, and management had neither the will nor the capacity to enforce rationalization plans. According to Kim Yonggi, many KSEC presidents were political appointees of the Rhee regime, and many of these executives came from the political or bureaucratic world or from the navy. They were replaced frequently, costing the company big severance payments. The inefficient, corrupt, and wasteful nature of management at the yard is confirmed in a joint Korean-U.S. investigation in 1958, discussed later in this chapter.42 As a result, the shipbuilding operation in the 1950s depended largely on the instincts and experience of skilled workers working under foremen.43 After the eclipse of the Chŏnp’yŏng local, a new labor union did not appear at the yard until 1953. According to the company history, a union was established in June of that year, three months after the passage of the labor laws of 1953. The KSEC union, however, did not show many signs of life for the next several years. Nor, for that matter, did it establish an affiliation with a nationallevel industrial federation until 1956. A vice president of the Chŏn’guk Haesang Nodong Chohap Yŏnmaeng (the Korean Maritime Trade Union Federation; hereafter, the Maritime Union),44 which the KSEC union joined in July 1956, did not remember whether there was a union at the KSEC before that time.45 He recalled that Kim Chŏnggŭn, who was the KSEC union president in 1956, was not a very energetic person. When right-wing Noch’ong activists were trying to take over the Chŏnp’yŏng-affiliated local, they arranged with the company to get members of the Northwest Youth Corps hired as KSEC employees to augment their number.46 Kim Chŏnggŭn was one of them. Until late 1950s the union seems to have existed mainly on paper. It did not enter into any negotiations with management and signed no contracts. The devastating impact of the red purges, the Anticommunist Alliance experience , many workers’ close encounters with death in the early months of the Korean War, and the grave effects of the war seem to have combined to produce K S E C W O R K E R S I N T H E 1 9 5 0 S 65 inertia among the KSEC workers during most of the 1950s.47 Massive reshuffling of the population between North and South Korea along political and ideological lines during the war resulted in an influx of 646,000 people fleeing from the North into the South (and a migration of 28,600 people to the North).48 South Kyŏngsang Province, especially the city of Pusan, was a popular destination for North Korean refugees during the war, attracting about 20.5 percent of northern refugees to South Korea.49 Almost 90 percent of northern refugees settled in urban areas. That means that some 130,000 northerners came to live in Pusan and its surrounding urban areas during the war, helping to swell Pusan’s 1949 population of 474,000 to more than a million by 1955.50 North Korean refugees before and during the war helped fill the ranks of right-wing youth organizations in Pusan, which in turn placed some of them as anticommunist unionists at major industrial sites, including the KSEC yard. Even so, progressive parties and thought were not eliminated in the South during these years, as the remarkable electoral success of the Progressive Party (Chinbodang) candidate, Cho Pongam, in the 1956 presidential election shows.51 Cho, as noted in chapter 2, was the first South Korean minister of agriculture, and he...

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