A bill to amend Articles 2 and 3 of the Trade Union Act passed the National Assembly’s plenary session on Nov. 9.
The amendment bill will help unionized workers bargain with their “real users” and better protect them from management’s murderous demands for damage compensation.
One of the chronic problems in the Korean job market is a multilayered subcontracting structure, denying laborers access to their substantive employers. That, in turn, makes it difficult to solve workers’ problems while saving money for managers. The anachronistic practice must go.
After strikes, workers often pay eye-watering sums to employers for work stoppages and broken facilities. Managers sue unionists without caring who damaged what and how much. Dozens of workers have committed suicide in despair. In 2014, citizens donated money to such unionists in yellow envelopes to help ease their plights, hence the nickname for the bill.
President Yoon Suk Yeol should sign it into law.
The reasons are aplenty. The bill will help to level the playing field that has been tilted in employers’ favor for the past seven decades. The Supreme Court ruled last year that holding individual workers accountable reduces their rights to organize and act collectively. President Yoon said recently he also would place people’s livelihood on top of everything. How could he improve the public’s everyday lives without enhancing workers’ rights?
However, Yoon will likely veto the bill, accepting recommendations from the government and its party. Employment and Labor Minister Lee Jung-sik, expressing “bitterness” over opposition parties railroading the bill at the Assembly, said it would “devastate industrial sites and weaken competitiveness.” People will find it difficult to know whether Lee is minister of labor or industry. They also can see why the government changed the ministry’s name by putting the word employment ahead of labor.
However, Lee was wrong on both counts. The Constitutional Court ruled last month that the oppositionists’ direct tabling of the bill to the plenary session was not illegal. How else could they handle the bill when the ruling party shuns it? International laws also encourage “real users” to bargain with workers, saying it will reduce the possibility of extreme labor struggles. Some foreign experts even ask how Korea, an advanced country, has allowed such outrageous compensations, which one-sidedly favor managers while driving workers to death.
Critics say Yoon has put many national agendas decades back. The labor issue is no exception. His ambitious labor reform plan hit a wall earlier this year, as he tried to make Koreans work up to 69 hours a week, citing improved workweek flexibility, and has been drifting ever since.
Koreans worked the fifth-longest among the 38 OECD member nations in 2021. Their productivity was 29th, however, falling far short of the OECD’s average. Germany’s metalworkers worked 35 hours a week in the 1990s and 28 hours now, although they can work 40 hours if they want. Korean workers’ low productivity was due mainly to their poor health.
Yoon, alarmed by strong popular repulsion, backed away, presenting 60 hours as a compromise. His administration will likely soon resume its reform drive based on the “new cap.” All this reaffirms how disconnected Yoon and his aides are from the workers, who want their maximum workweek not to exceed 40 hours.
Some may want to work even longer than 69 hours for more stable lives, even if that means shortening their lifespans. However, the government must prevent or minimize such desperate situations through policies ensuring better economic equality, rather than encouraging inequality.
There are some labor aristocrats, indeed — unionized full-time workers at large manufacturing firms receiving wages far higher than average and demanding more, such as employment inheritance for their children. The leader’s role is to persuade them to seek equity with other workers, not clamp down on them and call them cartels, unless they violate laws.
The two umbrella unions staged rallies over the weekend calling for the president not to veto the Yellow Envelope Act.
If pushed in defiance of the unions, Yoon's labor reform will turn the upcoming season into another winter of discontent. Korea’s labor culture will also roll back to the way things were in the 1970s and 1980s.