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14 November, 2005
South Korea’s business-oriented government has set its agenda for industrial relations reform, including weakening the regulations on use of irregular, or contract and agency workers.
The ruling Uri Party has defined 24 issues that are contained in four bills now in Parliament. The proposed legislation will meet a crucial test in an extraordinary session of Parliament scheduled for February. The reforms, if passed, would allow multiple unions on a jobsite, give employers the right to use temporary workers during strikes, and grant bosses longer time periods for contract and agency workers.
The government on 26 October erroneously reported that the number of non-regular workers this year over last decreased to 5.03 million, or 33.6% of the Korean workforce. Two days later it retracted those statistics and said the figure, in fact, was nearly a half-million workers more—5.48 million, or 36.6% of the workforce. The number of irregular workers this year had grown by 90,000 over 2004.