Joint statement issued by unions at Busan, Incheon, Ulsan and Yeosu-Gwangyang port authorities
Unions say government is pushing a 'unilateral policy' without verifying the case for consolidation
Opposition to the government's plan to merge four major port authorities is intensifying within the port industry.
The unions of the Busan, Incheon, Ulsan and Yeosu-Gwangyang port authorities have jointly called on the government to immediately halt a commissioned study on the merger, saying it is proceeding without any prior verification of whether consolidation is even necessary.
The four unions issued a joint statement Thursday criticizing a research project commissioned by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries — titled "Establishing a Port Authority Integration Roadmap and Improving the Legal and Institutional Framework" — as a unilateral and hasty policy push that presupposes merger as a foregone conclusion.
The unions said that since the government announced its plan to consolidate public institutions in September, concerns from local communities and the broader public about merging the port authorities had been raised repeatedly, and that the national audit also flagged problems with pursuing the consolidation without adequate review.
The unions said it was particularly troubling that the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries issued an emergency tender notice for the study on Nov. 5 — less than a month after the ruling party leader promised to re-examine the public institution consolidation plan through a party-level consultative body — calling it a move that ignores calls for a policy review.
The unions' central objection is that the process in effect skips any step to verify whether the merger is necessary or justified.
They said none of the 12 review tasks listed in the study's terms of reference includes an objective assessment of problems with the current port authority operating structure, or a comparative review of alternatives to consolidation.
A study that should first examine whether integration is truly needed, they argued, is instead focused solely on mapping out the effects and implementation of a merger after the fact.
The unions also criticized the pace of the process as excessively fast compared with other public institution merger cases.
According to the unions, the Ministry of Climate, Environment and Energy has been pursuing the consolidation of five state-owned power generation companies by spending about six months reviewing the necessity and direction of the merger before moving on to develop specific plans and an implementation roadmap.
By contrast, they said, the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries is pushing ahead with 12 tasks through an eight-month planning study without any prior verification of the case for merging the port authorities.
Questions about the transparency of the procurement process — conducted through an emergency tender — also came under scrutiny.
The unions questioned whether the ministry's decision to use an emergency tender in the name of expediting the merger meets the requirements for emergency bidding set out in Article 35, Paragraph 4 of the Enforcement Decree of the State Contracts Act, and called for the fairness and transparency of the contractor selection process to be verified.
They said they were particularly concerned that the government may be seeking to select a research institution that would simply back a conclusion it has already reached, and demanded that the procurement process and the criteria for selecting the research contractor be made fully public.
The unions said the merger of the port authorities goes beyond a simple reorganization of public institutions, with direct implications for the country's port logistics competitiveness, regional economies, the port industry ecosystem and the employment of staff.
The four unions accordingly made three demands of the government: an immediate halt to the port authority merger planning study, a ground-up re-examination of the necessity and justification for consolidation, and a guarantee of meaningful dialogue with unions, local civic groups, port industry workers and customers.
"The future of South Korea's four major ports is not something the government should decide on impulse — it must be determined through objective verification and democratic deliberation," the unions said in their joint statement.
"The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries must immediately halt its unilateral and hasty port authority merger planning study," they added.
gilbert@heraldcorp.com
