By Kang Seung-woo
Local business groups, including Samsung, SK and LG, have pledged to seek ways to support the underprivileged, but their words turned out to be little more than slogans, with most of them reluctant to hire the handicapped, a lawmaker said Wednesday.
Rep. Shin Young-soo of the governing Grand National Party (GNP) announced the 2009 employment statistics of the handicapped in Korea’s top 30 companies and their subsidiaries.
According to the figures, 12 major business groups offered few job opportunities for the physically-challenged last year, with each company’s hiring rate falling short of 1 percent. The 12 companies include GS Group, Hyundai Engineering and Construction, Shinsegae and the aforementioned Samsung, SK and LG.
The average rate for the top 30 groups stood at 1.51 percent. In addition, the hiring rate of those who are severely challenged in the cited firms tallied just 0.16 percent.
He said that just six corporations ― Hyundai Motor, POSCO, Hyundai Heavy Industries, KT, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering and GM Daewoo ― met a rule requiring the handicapped to make up at least 2 percent of a private firm’s total payroll.
Any business with over 100 employees that fails to follow the rule is obliged to pay a certain amount of money as a penalty.
Shin said that the statistics show that most major companies prefer paying the penalty to hiring the disabled.
As a matter of fact, the amount of money paid by the 30 companies for not meeting the rule reached 41.2 billion won ($36.46 million) last year.
Samsung paid the largest amount of 12.6 billion won, followed by LG and SK, which paid 6.2 billion won and 2.6 billion won, respectively. Lotte Group and GS Group rounded out the top five after each paid 2.1 billion won and 2.0 billion won.
“Along with change of understanding toward handicapped people, improvement of the system such as an expansion of subsidies and stronger penalties will translate to more employment of them,” he said.
“For severely-handicapped people, the government needs to step in aggressively to monitor if the current system for them is in operation.”