Yoon needs strategy to forge social consensus
Since his campaign days, President Yoon Suk-yeol has been vowing to reform this country's "rigid, inefficient and outdated" labor market.
As a result, detailed reform proposals, drafted by a blue-ribbon panel on Yoon's orders and unveiled Monday, aim to update the job market flexibly and efficiently. To sum up, its policy recommendations call for two things ― the overhaul of the rigid 52-hour workweek and to strengthen the performance-based pay system.
More specifically, the Future Labor Market Research Association proposed that overtime work hours, now allowed on a weekly basis, be managed on a "monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly" basis. In that case, workers can, or should, labor for 69 hours a week. The panel also advised employers to pay higher wages to more productive employees regardless of their service period.
Yoon's plan seems less radical than expected and has some reasonable points. It also seeks to strike a balance by guaranteeing more rest and enhancing a monitoring system to ensure its strict implementation.
However, the devil is not in the details but in Korea's "labor scene." The panel cited Germany and France as examples of running a flexible workweek. But German and French people work only 1,349 and 1,490 hours a year, while Koreans toil 1,915 hours, the fourth-longest in the OECD. In contrast, Korea's unionization rate of 14 percent is almost the lowest in the club of rich industrialized countries. Many workers cannot get legal holidays on an uneven playing field.
It is not surprising that umbrella labor groups opposed the plan immediately.
More problematic is the stance of Yoon and his administration toward labor. Experts say labor market reform requires firm determination, elaborate strategy and persistent persuasion. The Yoon government needs to have all of these.
The government seems quite triumphant after bringing down striking truckers to their knees. Yoon's approval rating increased as his supporters praised his successful protection of "law and order" from the striking workers the president dubbed as being as dangerous as "North Korean nuclear threats," even though they were saying they just don't want to die on the roads due to fatigue.
Even the victory over truckers was not won by a careful strategy but by waging a war of public opinion. Some conservative media outlets parroted, as they had always done in major labor strikes, the several trillion won in industrial losses with swollen figures based on a worst-case scenario. The accidental victory will be short-lived, as Yoon's far-right supporters complain the government conceded too much and the laborers feel deeply chagrined at the strong-arm tactics.
Yoon has just won a small battle against strikers, but will likely lose the larger war of labor market reform.
One needs to look no further than the two figures Yoon appointed to negotiate with the labor on behalf of the government. One is a labor activist-turned-ultraright ideologue, and the other is being used to disparage unionists. Are they for bargaining or fighting?
There is more evidence that Yoon is not serious enough to push ahead with complex reforms. For instance, the governing People Power Party agreed to let the more members of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea chair the National Assembly's Environment and Labor Committee for the latter half of the incumbent Assembly. Will the pro-labor DPK handle the process in ways Yoon wants? Or does the president think he has done his share by sending the ball to the opponent's court?
The chief executive reportedly got a hint from Germany's Hartz concept in mapping out his labor policy. However, despite many contributions the Hartz reform made to Germany's labor system, it failed to narrow the gap between full-time and part-time workers, one of the biggest problems in Korea.
If Yoon still wants to benchmark Germany, he needs to look at another side of the European country ― how to have the highest productivity while working the shortest hours. Yoon needs to discard a mindset stuck to 20th-century manufacturing if he wishes to upgrade Korea to a futuristic industrial power.
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