Last weekend, we found out more information about the workers’ strike at Kim’s Club we wrote about previously.
The news isn’t good. Over lunch on Saturday, a friend informed us that the protest involved contract workers terminated by New Core in advance of the July 1 implementation of the new Contractual and Part-Time Worker Protection Act.
Ostensibly designed to “protect” contract and temporary workers by requiring employers to make them full-time employees (with benefits) after two years, the real consequence has been for some companies to suddenly terminate contract workers who are nearing the limit.
New Core Department Store, owned by E-Land, fired 100 irregular workers and plans to replace another 350 with part-time workers from service agencies. April, New Core Department Stores, officially fired 260 irregular laborers and perhaps more. Now they also force other irregular workers to make contracts by month or day, according to an employee interviewed by the Kyeongin Daily on May 23.
…
[click to continue...]
By the long expressway camera of the law.
Highway speeds here are monitored by automatic camera, which snaps a photo of your front bumper if you pass a sensor going above the limit. Then, they attach it to a ticket (complete with chart for calculating the fine) and send it to you in the mail.
This is to avoid the, “It wasn’t me!” defense, though it sort of makes it look like the cops are informing us that our hatchback has been out carousing when we’re not looking. (”It’s 11 o’clock, do you know where your Kia is?”) You’ll notice they have a nice white box blocking out the view of the driver. I have blurred our license plate number but it’s clearly visible on the ticket and the picture.
I’m not real happy that Dave’s first reaction to this was: “Man! We need to get our GPS [software] updated!”
You know, because, clearly, the problem is that we don’t still know where all the cameras are, and not that “we” shouldn’t be driving so fast.
Since I won’t be going on any long hikes or running marathons anytime soon, I’ve been getting a lot of reading done. I just added my thoughts on the two most recent books—Helie Lee’s Still Life with Rice and Many Lives Intertwined by Hyun Sook Han—to my “reading up” page.
Though they are both really different books (one is a novel, the other a memoir), they are similar in that they both offer a glimpse into the lives of Korean women at very different points in the country’s history, offering voices and perspective that I don’t think are heard very often.
And what has really stayed with me are both women’s stories of life here during the Korean War and its immediate aftermath.
[click to continue...]
OK. Time for comic relief from Annamatic’s photo stream.
>
Snack
Originally uploaded by annamatic3000.
It’s ddeokbokki-flavored snack chips. Check out the piece of ddeok with the fork in his head!
