Thousands of bank employees fearful of massive job cuts staged a sit-in for the second consecutive day Saturday, urging the government to scrap the planned merger of South Korea's two major banks.
Some 15,000 employees from Kookmin Bank and Housing and Commercial Bank set up hundreds of tents and other makeshift dwellings, making the Kookmin Bank's education center in a northern suburb of Seoul resemble a refugee camp.
Two police helicopters hovered above amid rumors police that were soon to storm the compound to break up the strike.
"We are prepared to fight to the end or to victory," Korea Financial Industry Union (KFIU) spokesman Park Hee-Min told journalists.
KFIU has called for an all-out strike by all banks from Thursday.
"We will never let up until the announcement of the merger between Kookmin and Housing and Commercial is declared null and void," Park said.
He warned of stiff resistance from the strikers should the government use police to end the sit-in.
The government on Saturday held an emergency meeting of economic ministers and reaffirmed it would push ahead with ongoing banking sector restructuring despite labor unrest, officials said.
It also issued a fresh warning against the "illegal" strike. Seoul district court has issued arrest warrants for union leaders at the two banks.
The banks, which control about one third of South Korea's retail banking, have been forced to shut most of their branches due to the walkout.
Financial authorities said they expected the strike to lose steam over the weekend and Christmas Day, with striking workers sleeping in tents in increasingly cold weather. Temperatures were forecast to plummet to -12C (10.5 F) over the weekend.
Heads of Kookmin Bank's 590 branch offices across the country issued a joint statement denouncing the announcement of the merger as a breach of an earlier agreement struck by the government, management and labor unions.
The agreement calls for prior consultations between management and labor unions when the two banks merge their operations.
The two banks, which are relatively healthy, agreed on Friday to merge into a 127-billion-dollar "super bank" as a mainstay of government efforts to revamp the country's ailing banking sector.
The government plans to inject 7.1 trillion won (5.8 billion dollars) into six weak banks including two large banks -- Hanvit and Seoulbank -- to clear them of bad loans and combine them under a government-led holding company.
The four other weak banks are Peace, Kwangju, Cheju and Kyongnam.
South Korean financial institutions are saddled with 76 trillion won (64 billion dollars) of bad loans, accounting for 12.3 percent of all loans.
They have already set aside 37.4 trillion won as provisions to cover half of the bad loans.
The government has already spent 100 billion dollars since the 1997 Asian crisis to support the financial sector -- SEOUL (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
