[Editorial] Granting short-term workers ’regular’ status not enough

The union and the management at Woori Bank have decided to have the bank give its short-term workers regular employee contracts. This is very welcome progress. It must have been an especially difficult decision, given that its current permanent employees agreed to a wage freeze in order to alleviate the wage discrimination faced by so-called non-regular workers.

The way Woori is going about making its non-regular workers regular ones puts the highest priority on non-regular employees’ job stability and leaves eliminating the institutionalized discrimination between formal employees and non-regular ones a task to be dealt with later. They will become regular employees, but they will still be classified differently from everyone else. Non-regular workers who were already working at teller windows and marketing will continue to work in those positions and their pay will still be lower than that of the typical full-contract employee. Strictly speaking, therefore, the move only makes them "half-regular" workers. Not that the significance of the decision should be underestimated, because what non-regular workers want more than anything is stability in their jobs. Simultaneously making sure non-regular workers have stable jobs and eradicating all discrimination was never going to be busy. There was little choice but to recognize the reality of the situation and resolve the most urgent issue first, then work on what is next.

However, the issue that remains unanswered by Woori’s chosen course of action needs to be addressed. Woori Bank needs to announce what its plans are going to be for resolving pay discrimination between the two groups, even though both will hold "regular" worker status, and it needs to find a reasonable way for people to move from one group to the other. Woori will truly be a model for resolving the question of what to do for non-regular workers in Korea if the union and the management get together again and resolve the problems that remain. Something that really needs to be mentioned here is that Woori’s course of action could be used by other companies to make it look like they are avoiding the principle of non-discrimination towards non-regular workers, because making formerly non-regular workers "regular" employees by giving them a different classification would be the easiest way to not be seen as formally discriminating. But if this is the only progress made, these workers will be "second-class" regular employees, with the potential to be discriminated against forever.

While it has no direct relation to the case of Woori, a lot of people are critical of the legal requirement that says non-regular workers employed for two years or more are to be given regular contracts automatically. The criticism is that this law has led to massive layoffs because of the financial burden "regularization" creates for a company, and that ultimately makes life worse for people in non-regular positions. However, many non-regular jobs require special skills and in many cases it would be in a company’s interest to hire them as regular employees rather than firing them, so one might also expect a spread of this style of "second-class" employee hiring. Giving non-regular employees more stability is good, but everyone needs to remember that we need to give serious thought to the problem of the "second-class" worker, even if he or she is under a regular contract.

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