Chairman Hong Young-pyo of the National Assembly Environment, Labor Committee. (Photo: Chmn. Hong Young-pyo’s Office)

Chairman Hong Young-pyo of the National Assembly Environment, Labor Committee urged the ruling and opposition parties to agree on a step-by-step execution to ultimately curtail working hours at small and medium-sized companies.

“Such supplementary steps need to be taken to ensure the soft-landing of (the curtailment) like the step-by-step execution of a revision that would curtail working hours corresponding to the size of businesses in consideration of the difficult reality of SMEs,” he said in an interview on Sept. 19. 

Chairman Hong of the ruling Minju Party of Korea (MPK) said a revision bill of the Labor Standards Act would allow businesses employing between 30 and 100 workers to introduce the scheme to curtail working hours on a gradual basis over three or four years. 

The measure to revise the Labor Standards Act is the most contentious issue the current National Assembly wants to act on. 

The revision would include curtailing allowable working hours from the current 68 hours per week to 52 hours. Chairman Hong said, “Common ground is being built to some extent at Assembly regarding the step-by-step execution of the scheme as demanded by such economic organizations as the Korea Federation of SMEs. 

Hong stressed the need for the ruling and opposition parties to reach an agreement for the institutional settlement of the scheme. Both sides are now considering curtailing working hours in three stages, according to the number of each business’s workers.

Chairman Hong said an option of scrapping the administrative interpretation of spreading weekly working hours over five days instead of seven will be considered if the ruling and opposition parties fail to reach an agreement. The revision of the Labor Standards Act, enacted in 1996, stipulates weekly working hours as 52 hours. 

The current mess is caused by the government’s setting each week at five days, not seven days. 

The Labor Standards Act as of now has no legal bearing over working hours on Saturdays and Sundays, so workers are forced to work longer. 

The scrapping of the administrative interpretation will allow 1.4 million workers to benefit from reduced working hours, he said. Out of the nation’s total 19.5 million workers, 4 million of them are in a special category whereby they’re forced to work on the weekend. 

Chairman Hong recognized the need to introduce a flexible working hour system to ease the negative impacts of reduced working hours on businesses. A pay class system based on seniority does not suit an era of new industries, he said. The Korean labor market is required to have flexibility, but on precondition that the nation should have a solid social safety network like Northern Europe, Hong said. 

Regarding large-size company and public entity labor unions’ call for wage increases, he said large-size company labor unions should refrain from demanding a dramatic improvement of labor and work conditions. They need to work on how to lend a helping hand to the weak workers like non-regular employees, Hong said.