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This year, the seventh meeting of the US-ROK Defense Cost Negotiation negotiations, which decides how much we would like to share among the USFK installations, ended without agreement. The possibility of large-scale unpaid leave for Korean workers in the USFK, scheduled for April 1, has increased.

Reporter Hak-Woo Kim.

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The seven-day defense cost negotiations in Los Angeles, USA, ended empty-handed.

The United States is about $ 3.9 billion, four times more than last year, and we are raising it by around 10%.

Both sides ran parallel lines in the same position as in the last sixth.

Immediately after the negotiations, the evaluations were very different.

We said, "It's a stage where we can't reach a full agreement on the total amount, but we keep narrowing it down." The United States said that South Korea's need for greater concentration, flexibility, and gaps remained large.

In particular, in order to prevent large-scale unpaid leave for Korean workers in the USFK, our side even proposed a memorandum of understanding that the Korean government would pay labor costs, but the United States refused.

The whole defense cost must be settled or not.

The USFK has already notified 9,000 Korean workers that unpaid leave will begin on April 1.

[Son Ji-o / Chief of the Korean American Trade Union, the USFK: I need to act as a proxy driver from next month right now, but I have to earn anything.

Unemployment leave is more likely to become a reality for the remaining 5,000 people, except for around 4,000 manpower, and the USFK said it will notify each subject individually next Monday.

(Video coverage: Jaeyoung Lee, Video editing: Seungjin Lee, CG: Choi Haneul)