Yonhap
4/6/2007
Labor union members of the two Koreas will get together in the South Korean industrial city of Changwon for Labor Day on May 1, organizers said Friday.
This is the first time that the labor unions of the two Koreas, separated by the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone, have organized such a rally in South Korea, although they have held similar events at the North’s scenic Mount Geumgang along the east coast and in Pyongyang.
The agreement on the rally was reached at a meeting of labor union representatives in the North Korean border town of Kaesong Thursday. They agreed to hold the joint May Day festival in Changwon, 398 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on April 29-May 2.
The festival will feature a friendly soccer match, a tour of historic sites and meetings of labor union leaders.
“It would be the first inter-Korean May Day festival ever to be held in South Korea,” said Kim Myeong-ho, a chief planning official of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, one of the South’s two umbrella labor unions co-hosting the event.
The North Korean co-host is the Pyongyang-based General Federation of Trade Unions.
It is one of the achievements of rapprochement between the divided Koreas following the historic inter-Korean summit of June 2000, in which the leaders of the two Koreas signed an agreement on cross-border peace and reconciliation.
