hankyoreh

By Lee Jung-gook, staff reporter

Kang Da-jung hates the holidays. Hundreds of extra trains are scheduled for travelers heading to their hometowns, but Korail Tourism Development, the Korail affiliate where she works as a KTX guide, has only a fixed staff to handle the increased traffic. While everyone else is celebrating, the workload of Kang and her colleagues only grows.

So-called “two-two shifts” are quite common during the holidays. Workers on these shifts do not return home after clocking out. Instead, they sleep at the company offices and report to work right away the next day. Normally, a crewmember on a KTX high-speed train from Busan to Seoul would return home at the end of the day. A “two-two” worker has to make do with four to five hours’ sleep in a facility near the station before heading right back to Seoul. The Korean Railway Workers’ Union (KRWU) estimates the actual working hours for shifts at 25 hours.

The company’s schedules are not developed systematically. Often employees will be called up three to four days before an extended holiday and asked to work on those days. The company’s number is the one they most dread seeing on their mobile phones before a public holiday. Kang once received penalty points from the company for failing to pick up one of its calls, which she had feared was a holiday work request. The crewmembers who do work on holidays earn bonus points.

“If you have a lot of penalty points, it takes much longer to get promoted, so there’s really no choice in the matter,” Kang said. “It’s suppose to be a ‘recommendation,’ but really they’re twisting your arm. One time, I was just getting off work when I got a phone call telling me to come to work the next day, which was a holiday.”

It was tough, but Kang kept a smile plastered on her face when working through the long Lunar New Year’s holiday. The company had announced monitoring results just before, and one of its demands was “cheerfully greeting the passenger with eye contact.” “You should always be smiling when you make eye contact with the passenger,” a directive said. “Expressionlessness is a no-no. Manage your expression so that your smile is slightly wide.” The workers, already facing grueling working conditions, are literally being forced to grin and bear it.

More problematically, those grueling conditions apply only to the 550 affiliate employees. Their biggest complaint, the “two-two” system, doesn’t even exist for crewmembers employed at Korail itself. Korail Tourism Development has a separate regulation for “lodging two-return trip work” that allows it to set up different working systems.

“It’s a clear violation of the Labor Standards Act,” said Lee Jeong-min, head of the Busan branch of the Korean Railway Workers’ Union chapter for Korail Tourism Development. “They’re making you work 25 to 26 hours straight with basically no time to rest.”

“We’re seeing all kinds of labor exploitation practices in the name of ‘efficiency,’” Lee said.

Korail itself has an emergency standby staff that is first to get the call when extra service is scheduled. The system allows for workers to be called in suddenly on days when they are not scheduled to work.

The affiliate has no standby staff. And employees there receive a total of 104 days off each year, compared to 117 for Korail employees. Their wages are just half those of the Korail workers, the union claims.

The huge differences in working conditions between the parent company and its affiliate are more than just a case of simple labor discrimination, critics say. They are also seen as justifying a recent KRWU strike to oppose the establishment of a Suseo KTX affiliate. The argument is that the creation of such affiliates is closely tied to the matter of working conditions. According to current law, strikes that are not judged to be related to working conditions are viewed as illegal and punishable as obstructions of operations.

The National Assembly is already making plans to address the issue. The offices of Democratic Party lawmakers Park Soo-hyun, Eun Soo-mi, Lee Mi-kyung, and Jin Sun-mee have planned a round table event on Feb. 5 where affiliate employees are scheduled to tell their stories.

“The situation faced by affiliate employees is representative of the state of labor issues in South Korea - indirect employment, long hours, exploitative practices,” said Eun. “It’s also the future of the Suseo KTX affiliate.”

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