 |
|
||||||
| THE KAIST TIMES http://kaisttimes.com | |||||||
Legally, minors may perform the same labor as adults. As of last September, when the law as revised, everyone must get paid the same minimum wage - KRW 3,100 per hour - regardless of age. This is good news for young people, who increasingly want part-time jobs.
But how well is this law kept? Last July a crackdown on restaurants revealed that 51 out of the 90 inspected were in violation of minimum wage laws. This obviously indicates that there is a systematic problem of some kind. What kinds of problem is it, and what action should the government take? The core difficulty is the minimum wage.
The decision to increase the minimum wage was made by representatives of public interests and 16 businessman after 9 labor committee members' resignation. The protesters felt it was too tough for a small snack bar, where young people do most of their part-time work, to give a KRW 3,100 wage. The government should have taken this circumstance into consideration and made a sensible standard. In the future these laws must be made more flexibly, and realistically.
The process of hiring a young person is also very complex. This is understandable because a minor's rights must be protected. To hire a minor, a family-register certificate, a written consent of a person in parental authority, and an employment certificate are needed. Minors must also be kept from working from 10 pm to 6 am, and must be provided regular rest.
As a result, employers often avoid hiring young people - at least legally - because it is so much more annoying than hiring an adult. The government simply cannot expect minors to get jobs unless it eases this regulation or gives a benefit like a tax cut to people employing them. Such an easing would help meet the needs of both employers and workers.
Lastly, the law must be enforced, not merely revised. When people hire young people now, they typically determine compensation not by law but by market conditions around them. The biggest reason is simply that they aren't aware of the law. Therefore, the government should try to make people understand the law through guidebook distribution or some other form of advertisement.
The government also needs to oversee side-job placement agencies well enough to fix damage on the spot.
The reason why we have to pay attention to the part-time work situation is not because young workers deserve special privileges. It's just that in modern society young people need to buy things with money they earn themselves.
Labor is sacred. It is important that society supply jobs for people who want to work.
We hope that the part-time work problem can be smoothed out, as healthy young people's culture requires learning how to search for professional jobs and how to understand the economy generally, just as is the case in the West.
[© 2005 KAIST. This work is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license. Permission is granted to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work in unaltered form, with attribution to KAIST, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved.]