Contingent Workers:

Size, Legal Status and Organization

Hye-ja Kwon, FKTU Research Center

Job insecurity has become prevalent since the 1997 economic crisis in Korea, causing a rapid increase in the number of non-regular/casual workers. In 1998 non-regular/casual workers whose contract term is no more than a year accounted for 47.2% of the total workforce, and as of April 1999 the number already surpassed the number of regular workers, amounting to 51.8% of the total wage earners.

Although contingent workers are the most victimized working class in the economic crisis due to their unstable employment nature, they have been sidelined from the government labor policies, and the trade union movement has not been successful in organizing them. Under the circumstance where non-regular/casual workers outnumber regular workers, policy alternatives designed to reduce the absolute size of contingent workers are doomed to fail, and the employment stabilization policy should be undertaken at social level, not at enterprise level. Trade union movement should pave the way for the introduction of a supra-enterprise union system in order to represent half the workforce that have been ignored, taking into account the characteristics of contingent workers frequently moving from one company to another.

Regarding organizing contingent workers as the starting point of the overcoming the weaknesses of the current enterprise-based union system, this paper is designed to examine their legal status on grounds of the size and distribution of non-regular/casual workers and propose the basic direction of unions' organizing activities toward and labor policy for contingent workers.

This paper is composed of three parts.

The first part examines the size and distribution of contingent workers, with special emphasis on the employment contract period. Though the existing studies on contingent workers tend to focus on the issue of part-time work, this study widens the scope of contingent workers to the issue of short-term employment contract including part-time work. In addition, it shows that the Korean labor market is more flexible than that of any other countries compared in terms of the size of contingent workers. It reveals that in this landscape where more than half the total workforce are contingent workers, the present enterprise union system cannot protect the rights and interests of contingent workers or effectively address the issue of replacement of regular workers with contingent workers.

The second part deals with the legal status of contingent workers by comparing Japan and Korea. In spite of the similarities in the labor-management relations and labor laws scheme with respect to contingent work between the two countries, the Korean scheme may be characterized by its exclusion of important issues such as protection of contingent workers and substitution of regular workers with contingent workers. This paper looks at the legal status of contingent workers from the perspectives of short-term contract labor, temporary service, and part-time work and suggests legal improvements for the protection of rights and interests of contingent workers and the prevention of replacement of regular workers with contingent workers.

The third part offers a new starting point to the enterprise-based trade union movement as for the organization of contingent workers based on self-examination of the current trade union movement. This paper points out that limitation of the present unionization rate of 11% resulted from the limited view of the enterprise union movement which has conventionally confined its organization targets to regular workers within enterprises only, and unless it discards this narrow view on organization, it will be almost impossible either to raise the unionization rate or even to sustain the current one. This paper insists that the existing trade union movement be the agency of organizing contingent workers, and the existing regional organizations be revitalized and organize them at supra-enterprise level. This paper also argues that it is essential for enterprise unions to exert efforts to improve wages and working conditions of contingent workers, regardless of their union status, in order to prevent the replacement of regular workers with contingent workers.