Can you say it is a fair society where some workers doing exactly same work receive half the wages of others? And can a government that does nothing to rectify this situation advocate a fair society as its slogan?
Answers to these questions are too evident to think about for long. Yet these are the situations that face Korea’s labor markets today and are crippling part of operations at Hyundai Motor, the nation’s largest and the world’s fifth largest automaker.
All this started this last July when the Supreme Court rightly ruled that ``irregular workers” ― temporary laborers without full-time contracts ― who had worked at Hyundai for more than two years should be regarded as ``regular workers,” quashing the original ruling and returned it to the Seoul High Court. Hyundai had circumvented the law, which obligates the conversion of irregular workers into regular ones after two years, through the ``irregular scheme of in-house subcontracting.”
The carmaker alleges the ongoing strike by its temporary workers is illegal, as the Supreme Court ruling applies to a few litigants and the final ruling is still pending. The allegation is not wrong in a narrow legal sense. Even the Ministry of Employment and Labor may also be right in brushing aside the 10-day walkout as unlawful, as the law excludes worker’s status from reasons for a collective action.
But the ministry has been turning a blind eye to the far bigger ― and far longer ― anomaly committed by Hyundai, which has met up to 20 percent of its manpower demand with irregularly hired staff.
The automaker is concerned ― with reason ― the simultaneous conversion of nearly 10,000 irregular workers into regular ones would incur several hundreds of billions of won in additional labor costs, making it hard to compete with global competitors. Yet, the company should show a modicum of sincerity in seeking a compromise. Refusing to recognize the temps as a dialogue partner is immoral, while bracing for numerous individual lawsuits is unrealistic.
Most regretful in this regard is the stance of the labor ministry, which seems to have acted like an on-looker, forgetting it is one of the trilateral committee for industrial peace.
This is no time for the ministry to be bent on siding with the large companies, parroting the use of temporary workers is a global industrial trend.
Hyundai Motor is the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as the irregular workers account for 55 percent of the nation’s shipbuilders and 42 percent of steelmakers. Unless the three parties tackle this problem in earnest, before long it will emerge as another social time bomb rocking the whole nation. President Lee Myung-bak can no longer talk about a fair society if he fails to correct the situation, in which 21 percent of manufacturing workers and 54 percent of service laborers receive half the wages of regular employees.
At least the Lee administration must force or goad employers into talking with the labor to shake off the stigma of a ``lip service-only government.”