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GM Korea factory in Changwon

The Supreme Court issued a final ruling maintaining that in-house subcontractor workers at GM Korea, like those at Hyundai Motor, are to be considered full-time employees of the automaker.

The Supreme Court’s first division under Justice Lee In-bok ruled on June 10 in favor of five irregular workers at GM Korea’s Changwon factory, including a 44-year-old surnamed Kang, who had filed suit to demand confirmation of their status as GM Korea employees. Some companies in South Korea use subcontractors as a way to more easily hire and dismiss workers, so as to pay them lower wages and withhold benefits. But South Korean law stipulates that if workers remain in the same workplace for two years, they must be recognized as employees.

The ruling was made in the form of a rejected appeal without further trial, a system in which the Supreme Court rejects a case as a matter for appeal without trying the case itself. The court’s decision comes in the wake of several other rulings finding in-house manufacturing company subcontractor workers to be regular workers since a July 2010 Supreme Court ruling acknowledging the regular worker status of Hyundai Motor in-house subcontractor employee Choi Byeong-seung.

Kang and the other plaintiffs were hired as irregular workers at a partner business with a GM Korea subcontract between 1996 and 2003. Since then, they have worked alongside regular GM Korea employees packaging products and distributing materials at the automaker’s Changwon plant.

They first filed suit against GM Korea in May 2013 to have their worker status recognized. In Dec. 2014, Changwon District Court ruled that the plaintiffs “must be regarded as in a worker dispatch relationship whereby they were hired by a partner business and sent to the GM Korea workplace to receive direct commands and orders from GM Korea.”

With its ruling, the court confirmed that the workers “are in the status of GM Korea employees” - meaning that their employment, like that of in-house subcontractor workers at Hyundai Motor and elsewhere, constituted illegal dispatch hiring.

GM Korea appealed the ruling, but neither the appeals court nor the Supreme Court accepted its argument.

Following the victory by Kang and the other plaintiffs, another 78 workers with in-house subcontractors at GM Korea’s Changwon, Bupyeong, and Gunsan plants filed suit with Incheon District Court. That case is currently under way.

By Jeong Eun-joo, staff reporter

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