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- Special City Respecting Workers’ Rights
Special City Respecting Workers’ Rights
■ Current status of industrial structure
- Mostly made up of service businesses that are very small, with less than 5 employees
- Workers engaged in the service sector and small businesses are susceptible to falling into a labor rights-related dead zone, where they are easily denied labor rights
■ Current status of the economically active population
- The decline of job security for vulnerable workers: Female employment rate (51.3%), employment rate of people aged over 60 (36%)
- Increasing number of non-regular workers: 32.5% of the workforce are non-regular workers, the number of young non-regular workers has continued to increase since 2007.
■ Working conditions
- Long working hours (43.7 hours per week), degradation of workers’ quality of life.
- 65.1 % of workers in Seoul report feeling insure about their jobs
- Deteriorating working conditions because of increasing non-regular workers
- Steady increase in cases related to the rights and interests of workers, such as delayed payment of wage and unjustified dismissal. In particular, it is estimated that the number of unpaid workers is 72 000.
Reports on violations of labor-related laws by year
| 2007 | 260,000 cases |
| 2010 | 300,000 cases |
| 2014 | 330,000 cases |
- Wage structure: Wages of day laborers is a mere 33% of that of regular workers, and 21.7% of day laborers are paid lower than the minimum wage.