Too Much Favor for Labor
The Ministry of Employment & Labor officially discarded the previous administration’s labor reform policy allowing low-performing workers to be fired and allowing rules of employment to be changed with ease.
The two measures were prepared in January 2016 and unilaterally implemented by the South Korean government. The labor community resisted and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions left the Korea Tripartite Commission.
Close attention is being paid to whether the tripartite dialogue will be resumed in the near future. The two policy measures boosted the conflict between workers and the government and the former have been dead set against the measures, claiming that those facilitate dismissal. The measures do not have any legal binding force but have functioned as a sort of guidelines.
“We hope the dialogue will be resumed based on the invalidation of the policy,” the ministry said. The labor community commented in response that the invalidation is welcome news but the time is not yet ripe for the resumption of the dialogue. “The government should also repeal the corrective orders applied to collective agreements and try harder to guarantee basic labor rights,” it said.