Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
A strike by truckers in South Korea has entered its seventh day, after talks failed to yield a breakthrough, forcing more factories to cut production due to a lack of warehouse space to stock products.
On Monday, petrochemical firms joined the automobile and steel makers in cutting operations due to mounting inventories as transport disruptions spread across the South Asian country.
According to Press TV, the industry association representing 32 petrochemical companies in South Korea said the average daily ex-factory shipments of their member companies had plunged by 90 percent due to the strike.
“The Cargo Truckers Solidarity union’s collective action to reject transportation is spreading the damage to major petrochemical complexes in Ulsan, Yeosu, and Daesan,” the Korea Petrochemical Industry Association said in a statement.
Steelmaker POSCO has said it would halt some plants due to a lack of space to store unshipped products.
Automakers were also hit hard by the truckers’ strike as they were not able to transport finished products.
Defiant South Korean truckers, numbering around 22,000, started the strike on Tuesday in protest against soaring fuel costs and to demand basic pay guarantees
The truckers’ strike has severely disrupted the country’s supply chain in the last week.
Political analysts see the strike as a first test of the managerial skills of the new South Korean President, Yoon Seok-youl, who has been in power for only one month.
Yoon urged the truckers on Thursday not to resort to violence and said the government is trying to resolve the situation through dialogue.
