My mentor once said that many of developing countries are suffering from side effects/defects en route to the industrialization. The side effects /defects have been already suffered by many advanced societies since their initial burst of industrialization longer than a centry ago. In the land I reside, I feel what he said up close and personal in everyday life. Since the IMF Crisis in 1997, along with other neighboring countries, Korea particularly, has entered into a stage of a brutally competative mode of "survival of the fittest."
First year of my return to Seoul, it was rather invisible to obseve the such harsh reality. Yet, well I guess my luck might come into an end, the workplaces and people I have encountered since then were hardly have any reserves for anything else other than their obsessive struggle to survive in an immense competition they were facing against on every day basis. For example, I have to tell you that averagely at least a couple of employees have been forcefully laid off from work every other months at the firm that I have been working for a year. And now, it is facing a massive downsizing, almost restructing of the firm. Already three workers that I have been acquainted with were told to resign. No doubt it is certainly very depressing to see people leave the workplace against their will, and at the same time makes me wonder that this firm is capable of running the business with an eye to foresee at least a couple of fiscal years ahead. It hires people and lets others go, TOO OFTEN. I understand when running a business, there are ups and downs. However, if one looks for establishing a sound/morally responsible firm, she/he needs to see at least some coming years ahead and lay out the precise/approachable plans, accordingly. People are smiling but there is an eerie sense of heaviness in the air, they stay latea almost every day, God only knows why. If one has a lot of things to do, that certainly is understandable, otherwise, what on earth will staying all day in the office prove? Within the same partitioned section of the office in which I have been working for a year, two out of four are leaving. Isn't it depressing?
From a broader perspective, yet along the same line of thoughts described above, I would like to bring up the issue Korea has been dealt with for some time. Korea's free trade agreements (FTA) with some countries including the US, the EU, Chile, etc., throws some doubts on its effectiveness in terms of improving a quality of lives of individuals. In spite of the desperate efforts of mine to follow the relevant cases, there are still many parts of the FTA negotiations and treaties that I don't fully comprehend. As Korean government and its supporting scholars argue, the pie may be able to increase its size upto some point, but the question is, will it favorably and evenly affect to all??
The strongest and most prominent industry for Korea when it fully opens its market to the world (the US especially) will probably a cutting-edge computerized IT technologies that a few Korean based conglomerates have owned, in particular, the semiconductor manufacturing industry. Yes, certainly, the pie for those working for Samsung and its subsidiary firms may well be enlarged, so that they can argue the FTAs are beneficiary. But how on earth would the government explain that increasing numbers of unemployed youths and early-retired still workable mid-aged work force, ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor, obviously foreseeable failure in agricultural and poultry industry, etc., which have worsened over the years as Korea has opened its market to some natons? I have to tell you that Korea's FTAs, in particular the one with the US is not quite beneficiary for all. As a matter of fact, it may do so for very few chunks of the society, and it will surely increase the already existing high level of competetiveness in the region.
Here is an important question raising therefrom. I see most of people working in Korea very exhausted and helpless sometime from excessively overloaded amount of work, and almost given up to take care of family lives (no need to remind you of the highest growing rate of divorse, ever decreasing birth rate, prevalent fashion of 'considering marriage as an option', etc. These phenonena may not be new things for most of capitalistic societies, so I wonder why on earth all nations took a role model only (seemingly) from the American capitalism?? Is it really the most ideal system a nation can be run therein? Or, simply the rest of the world doesn't have any other choises because of notoriously bully policies the US has been forcing upon the rest of the world?
The point is, gosh, I need dayoffs that I can spend some valuable time together with my beloveds, and a work area that I don't have to suffocate myself with intoxicating ordors of men smoking cigarettes from stairways of the building. Will the earth ever be like what it is in heaven?
