The South Korean government is to revise regulations for hiring non-regular workers to prod the public and private sectors to recruit employees on a permanent basis, officials at the finance and labor ministries said Sunday.
Revisions due within the year will limit public sector employment of temporary workers to 5 percent of the total workforce from 2016, recognize non-regular workers' work experience, and guarantee additional compensation for non-permanent workers who are denied their wages, according to the officials.
The government plans to provide smaller firms that cannot afford to hire permanent workers with financial assistance for up to a year. The assistance, aimed at transferring non-regular workers to permanent jobs and narrowing the salary gap for contract workers, will be around 16 billion won (US$15.13 million), officials said.
The government, however, plans to restrict hiring of temporary employees in jobs that have to do with public safety, including passenger transportation.
"Some of the jobs that deal with people's safety have a high proportion of non-permanent workers, making it difficult to expect accountability," an official said.
The revisions are under discussion between ministries and labor specialists, he said. "The goal is to announce the results next month, but there is a chance that the announcement may be delayed to December."
Statistics indicate that South Korea has some of the worst labor conditions for contract workers among developed countries. A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed that only one or two in every 10 contract workers ends up being hired as a permanent employee, with the rest either losing their job or moving on to other contract work.
The proportion of non-permanent workers being hired for a permanent position after a year was 11.1 percent, according to the report, with 69.4 percent remaining on a contract basis. Another 26.7 percent became unemployed.
Figures from Statistics Korea showed the number of temporary workers increasing throughout this year, from 34.6 percent of the total working population in the first quarter to 35.3 percent in the second, and 35.5 percent in the third quarter.
The salary gap was widening at the same time, according to another report from the labor ministry. Last year, non-regular workers were paid 47 percent of what permanently-hired counterparts earned.
Some 62.6 percent of those with Ph.D degrees were working in non-permanent positions, the report said.
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, an umbrella group of unions, demanded that the government meet directly with workers to find out what they really need before drawing up the revisions.
"The government says it will make an announcement of comprehensive measures, but hidden behind the move is an attempt to increase the number of sectors that allow dispatching of temporary staff members to other worksites and increase the number of the elderly in the non-permanent workforce," the group said. (Yonhap)