Gender income gap grows

/ Yonhap

By Lee Ji-hye

The income gap between male full-time employees and female temporary workers has increased significantly over the past 10 years.

According to the Korea Labor and Society Institute, an average female temporary worker received 37.3 percent of what a regular male employee got a month in 2004. Last year's figures showed that fell to 35.9 percent.

Hourly pay also dropped, from 42.9 percent more than 10 years ago, to 41.8 percent last year.

"For the last decade, conditions have been insufficient for irregular workers, such as social insurance registration rates, which did not exceed 30 percent," said Kim You-sun, a senior research fellow at the institute.

"This clearly shows that current labor laws are failing as a system to protect the temporary workers they were made to help."

The study also noted that the number of temporary workers had nearly doubled in the past 10 years _ there were 1,070,000 temporary workers in 2004, while in 2014 there were 2,030,000.

Kim said the figures showed that working conditions had become worse.

"In order to fight the discrimination that female irregular workers face at work each day, the President must work to live up to her election pledges, including improving the quality of employment, systemizing labor unions and extending the effects of collective agreements,” Kim said.