By Lee Tae-hoon
Staff Reporter
Companies will be banned from paying wages to full-time union leaders, and multiple unions will be permitted at a single workplace from July next year.
The Cabinet approved the bill calling for changes in the nation's labor union system, which passed in the National Assembly, Friday, in a vote of 173-1 with one abstention despite objections from labor groups and opposition parties.
Without Assembly approval of the revisions, the disputed union rules would have taken effect Jan. 1.
Lawmakers of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) and the Park Geun-hye Alliance participated in the vote, while lawmakers of the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) and Democratic Labor Party boycotted it.
Speaker Kim Hyong-o unilaterally tabled the bill after an inter-party failure to reach a compromise.
The ruling party has 169 seats in the 299-member Assembly, enough to pass bills on its own. The DP has 87 seats.
Opposition parties have criticized the compromise bill struck between Choo Mi-ae, chairwoman of the Assembly committee on labor affairs, and the GNP, arguing that umbrella unions should not be excluded from labor-management negotiations.
Unionists say both those measures will weaken their activities.
In 1997, the Assembly endorsed a bill that was supposed to introduce the multiple-union system and drop full-time union workers from payrolls from 2002.
However, it postponed the implementation of the law to Jan. 1, 2010 by revising the legislation twice in 2001 and 2006.
The bill approved by the Cabinet will go into effect after President Lee Myung-bak's expected final endorsement.