Saturday, September 6, 2008

Seoul Shelves KORUS FTA By Oh Young-jin at Korea Times

Lee Hye-min, deputy trade minister and chief FTA negotiator

Korea has given up hope of having its free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States ratified before the Nov. 4 U.S. presidential election, a senior trade official said Monday.

During an interview with The Korea Times, Lee Hye-min, Korea’s deputy minister for trade and chief FTA negotiator, said, ``It is certain that the U.S. will not be able to ratify the agreement until the presidential election.

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

NY TIMES ‘In the Produce Aisle, Solidarity for Korean Grocers’ By SEWELL CHAN

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/in-the-produce-aisle-solidarity-for-korean-grocers/index.html?hp

*In 2001, union organizers from Local 169 of Unite Here, representing Hispanic grocery workers, reached a labor agreement with Korean business owners. (Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)

Few immigrant groups are as closely identified with an occupational niche as Koreans with grocery stores. While mom-and-pop produce stores have become an engine of economic mobility and opportunity for some Korean families, Korean produce merchants in New York City have often found themselves in conflict with white wholesale distributors, black customers and labor unions representing Hispanic employees, according to a new book by a Queens College sociologist.

The sociologist, Pyong Gap Min, who also teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, offers a look at the complex role that ethnicity plays in immigrant businesses in New York in the book, “Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Greengrocers in New York City,” published recently by the Russell Sage Foundation, which finances research in the social sciences.

Among the most interesting insights in the book are Dr. Min’s explanation for why “Korean-black conflicts, which peaked in the later 1980s and early 1990s, have almost disappeared since the mid-1990s,” and his descriptions of how Korean grocers organized themselves to gain more leverage in their dealings with white wholesalers at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx.

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