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390 points AndrewDucker | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pcurve ◴[] No.21831418[source]
I'll bite. My father worked there from early 70s to late 90s.

Samsung dynasty is famous for being anti-union. That anti-union stance is deeply embedded in the company DNA. Union busting activities have been going on since day 1.

The Samsung founder once said, "Union over my dead body". Throughout its 50 year history, the company managed to operate without any official Union representation.

And if you spend time there long enough like my father, that DNA gets slowly worked into you, just like the current execs being tossed into jail.

A few years after my father left Samsung, he ended up as a chief exec at a pharma company for 10 years. For an older generation guy, he is extremely left-leaning and progressive. Except his disdain for unionizing. He would talk painfully about dealing with union leaders at company plant.

Some of that is probably attributable to his Samsung days.

This is a big message being sent to Samsung management culture from SK government who has turned blind eye to its union busting practice for 50 years.

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4ntonius8lock ◴[] No.21831610[source]
Amazing, thanks for sharing. Can I ask why you think SK is putting such a prominent figure in jail over this?

I mean this in the sense that, first you guys are doing the right thing and second I think here in the US we have a terrible track record of making corporate leaders responsible for criminal activity. I'm really interested in what systematic differences exist between us that allow you guys to actually hold the powerful responsible for their crimes?

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1. Ericson2314 ◴[] No.21831962[source]
I'm a guessing American, but the rightism of modern Korean history is more accute than in the US. (Imagine if we were poor in the 1950s with some McCarther then Goldwater dictators.) Democracy is newer (not historical strong but good trend), and Samsung is more iconic a foe; imagine if FAANG and IBM were all rolled together.

US has tons of inertia both due to it's size and silly governmental structure. Local governments can't or don't do very much interesting in US, but they punch beyond their weight on blocking interesting federal stuff. You can think of foreign adverturism and military bloat as in part an outlet for all the political energy and ambition that should have gone into worthwhile things.

Koreans make cheap nuclear power plants, remember. When the political will lines up, shit can happen. Moon knows the history and so do the people, and those on his side our very self-aware in this being an overdue course correction. Tons of news led up to this, and should lead past this.