ed Temporary workers’ woes

Seoul should change perception in labor policy

Ten days have passed since two men started their protests, each standing on a 2-square-meter wooden board tied to the beams of a 50-meter-high steel tower. A gust of wind could see them fall to the ground at any moment. As risky and nervy as the scene is, it symbolizes the reality of numerous temporary workers here walking on the edge.

The duo, non-regular laborers at Hyundai Motor, vow never to climb down from the electricity transmission facility until the carmaker promises to make all their 8,000 colleagues into regular, full-time staff.

Their union has turned down Hyundai’s proposal to upgrade the status of 3,000 workers by 2016, sticking to an all-or-nothing strategy and with good reason. The management’s proposal is little more than filling the void caused by the retirement of 2,500 workers this year. Instead of recruiting new, inexperienced workers, the company is repositioning skilled non-regular employees there by giving them starting salaries.

It will allow the nation’s largest and the world’s fifth largest automaker to save labor costs and solve work force problems. On the other side of the same coin, exactly the same number of unemployed people, including new college graduates, will continue to be jobless, while there will likely be a serious organizational split in the union, as the 8,000 temporary workers will fiercely compete to be included in the lucky 3,000.

And there are more than a hundred reasons to do so.

It was after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s that the Korean businesses, in a shift from the previous lifetime employment, started to use temporary workers, who toil full-time but on short-term, renewable contracts, often signed on their behalf by agencies called “service companies” in the form of in-house subcontracting. They do the same work as the regular, full-timers but receive about half the wages, fewer benefits and none of the legal protection against layoffs the latter have.

In countries with rigid labor markets like Korea’s, temporary workers provide a perfect alternative for profit-minded employers, which explains why up to one third of all Korean workers have been reduced to nonregular employees, showing a higher percentage than in any other major economies, and emerging as the main culprit behind the almost incurably-polarized economy. Successive governments, especially the growth-oriented Lee Myung-bak administration, have pledged to resolve this issue but turned the other way once elected.

A recent IMF report shows there are other reasons other than humane ones for the government to change its perception in labor policy. The report on the Korean economy’s “sustainable and all-embracing growth,” forecasts the nation’s gross domestic product will grow an additional 1.1 percent a year for 10 years if only the government can solve the two-tiered labor market structure of regular and non-regular workers. We agree. That would allow Seoul to better tap into the vast female workforce, whose portion of temporary workers (42 percent) is far higher than that of their male counterparts (28 percent), and lead Korea to income- or wage-led growth.

The time has long past for the government, instead of siding with employers, to make new approaches to this social headache. It can start by bringing down the two workers.