hankyoreh

By Jeon Jong-hwi, staff reporter

On Sep. 22, Lee Ki-Kweon, Minister of Employment and Labor, held a press conference to address the ruling by the Seoul Central District Court on Sept. 18 and 19 that all 1,179 in-house subcontractor workers at Hyundai Motor are being illegally dispatched. While Lee urged a swift resolution to the issue of illegal dispatching, he said that the illegality should be resolved by adhering to a trilateral agreement between Hyundai Motor, the Hyundai labor union, and the subcontractor workers labor union. In effect, Lee said that the labor unions and company management should take care of the issue themselves.

But that’s not what the law says. The Act on the Protection of Dispatched Workers states that business owners who send or receive dispatched workers are to be punished by up to three years in prison and a fine not exceeding 30 million won (US$28,733).

This is no slap on the wrist. The reason the penalty is so strict is that dispatching is the only system of intermediary exploitation that is permitted by the Korean legal system.

The practice is tolerated in some industries in which dispatching is inevitable, while harsh punishment is decreed for those who break the law. The Dispatch Act even gives the Minister of Employment and Labor the authority to shut down companies that engage in illegal dispatching.

One major reason that the issue of illegal dispatching at Hyundai Motor has gone unresolved for more than ten years - even as numerous subcontractor workers who went on strike have been sued by the company for compensation, gone to jail, and even died - is that the laws on the books have been growing dusty from disuse.

Hyundai Motor could regularize all of its illegally dispatched subcontractor workers to for 300 billion won (US$287.87 million). It is bizarre why the company, which turns a deaf ear to such demands, paid 10.5 trillion won (US$10.06 billion) for the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) plot of land, which was appraised as only being worth 3.33 trillion won.

On Sep. 19, Lee Ki-kweon announced that he was appealing a recent decision by Seoul High Court to suspend the effect of the government’s decision to strip the Korean Teachers’ and Education Workers’ Union (KTU) of its legal status. “We are very disappointed in the court’s decision to request a constitutional review of the law,” Lee said.

The original reason given by the Ministry of Employment and Labor for declaring that the KTU was not a union was that actual workers should be the core of a labor union and dismissed workers could weaken the union‘s autonomy. Thus, the Ministry demonstrated its firmness by depriving 60,000 people of their right to organization because of nine dismissed workers.

I’m curious why the same firmness is not being applied to a large corporation that is guilty of illegal dispatching - especially when the court’s decision that 127 manufacturing processes at Hyundai Motor and 9,300 workers involve illegal dispatching is exactly the same as the conclusion reached by the Ministry of Labor in 2004.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]