Labor Minister Lee Young-hee |
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Labor Minister Lee Young-hee announced Saturday that he would double to four years a grace period for renewing employment contracts of non-permanent workers.
In a National Assembly committee meeting, he urged lawmakers to pass a motion to lengthen the mandatory renewal period to four years from the current two.
He said it needs at least four years for a worker to master skills. ``I hope the companies will gladly rehire them as permanent workers.''
He also added that the non-permanent worker position may be less prestigious than permanent ones, but is still better than being unemployed. ``At the moment, I don't think it is time to talk about the quality of jobs. We are busy talking about the quantity.''
The original Non-Permanent Worker Protection Law requires all employers to change temporary workers contracts into permanent contracts once individuals have been employed for more than two years.
Workplaces hiring more than 300 workers are already subject to the change.
The law was imposed to help temporary workers suffering from discrimination in the workplace live better lives.
But the plan triggered resistance among businessmen. Since permanent workers require more maintenance costs, such as health, employment, industrial accident insurance and national pension among others, business leaders opposed the law. CEOs said the Korean market is not mature enough to pay all such costs.
The minister has indicated the revision several times.
Still, unionists oppose the plan. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, one of the nation's two umbrella unions, said the government is giving companies a good excuse to abuse manpower with low costs for a longer period since some companies have already tried to sack workers ahead of filling up the mandatory period to avoid having to renew a contract.
``Who would like to hire staff on a permanent status when you can use them for much cheaper costs for four years? It shows that the government is not interested in the real lives of workers,'' the group's spokeswoman Wu Mun-suk said.
Experts are quite skeptical too. Eun Soo-mi, a researcher at Korea Labor Institute, said this would give companies the indefinite right to ``discard'' manpower whenever they needed to.
``The average period for one non-permanent worker hired to a company is three years. Guaranteeing a four-year-period will justify their `grab-and-throw away' policy,'' she said.
She said non-permanent workers do not receive training like permanent ones and therefore have no chance to ``master'' the skills as the minister suggested ``The decision is worrisome,'' she added.
bjs@koreatimes.co.kr
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