Good working hours for all
workers: Delivery drivers, motorcycle delivery workers, and migrant workers in the
agriculture and fishery sectors

Hye Eun Lee, KILSH member

Medical College of Hallym University

2022

It is important to ensure
that the forty-hour workweek regulation in the Labor Standards Act can be applied
to all working people.

Although general economic activities have contracted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to find people who suffer from a significantly intensified workload. One typical example is parcel delivery drivers. Even the ‘social agreement’ among parcel delivery workers, the government, and logistics firms could not clearly resolve the issue of long working hours, resulting in a prolonged strike. From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to June 2021, more than twenty parcel delivery drivers died
from long working hours including night work. The South Korean government made a standard contract limiting weekly working hours to no more than than sixty hours, as a key component of the social agreement to reduce parcel delivery drivers’ death from overwork (known as Karoshi). South Korea has a forty-hour workweek system. Even if twelve hours per week of overtime work can be added legally, weekly working hours should not be more than fifty-two hours per week. However, the ‘standard’ for parcel delivery drivers is sixty hours per week. Sixty hours of work per week is so extreme that work-relatedness with cerebrovascular or cardiovascular diseases can be automatically recognized in the workers’ compensation system. To achieve this extreme working hour limit, parcel delivery workers lost many of their colleagues to overwork and had to fight through a strike.

Motorcycle delivery of take-out food and other items is another prominent job during COVID-19 pandemic (formerly known in South Korea as quick service). At the end of 2021, the Ministry of Employment and Labor disclosed the results of an inspection on the implementation of safety measures in seventeen food delivery platform companies nationwide and a survey on 5,600 delivery workers[1]. Contrary to the general thinking that most delivery workers are young people who want to work casually for a few hours, 68 percent of delivery workers worked full-time. These full-time delivery riders worked 5.8 days per week on average and 18.9% worked seven days a week. Sixty-seven percent (67.3%) of delivery riders worked longer than 8 hours per day which is the standard working hour. Twenty-two percent (22.5%) of full-time riders worked longer than 12 hours per day. The average number of working hours per day was 9.4 hours for full-time riders, assuming no one works longer than 12 hours. These numbers illustrate that motorcycle delivery workers suffer from long working hours.

Migrant workers in the agriculture and fishery sectors are typically considered to be vulnerable. Working conditions are poor according to a study of 63 Cambodian migrant workers’ health conditions conducted by People of Earth’s Station and Workers Health Promotion Center in Paju Hospital of Gyeonggi Provincial Medical Center.[2] According to the study, 40% of all responders worked longer than ten hours per day on average. Long working-hours were especially prevalent in the agriculture and fishery sectors where 69.7% of the respondents worked longer than ten hours per day. Approximately forty percent (39.7%) of respondents had two days off or less per month. Thirty-three percent (33.4%) worked sixty hours or more per week, which is regarded as chronic overwork in the criteria for adjudication of workers’ compensation claims on death from overwork (karoshi).

Our society absolutely needs parcel delivery workers, motorcycle delivery workers, and migrant workers in the agriculture and fishery sectors. However, these essential workers cannot be protected by the Labor Standard Act because either they are not legally recognized as worker (employee) or their jobs are excluded from application of the working hour regulation. In addition, reducing working hours could threaten most of their livelihoods because their hourly wages are extremely low.

‘Average’ working hours can mislead people

In Korea, the status of working hours is usually described by the average annual hours worked issued by OECD. For example, in 2020, the average annual working hours in Korea were 1,908 hours which is 221 hours longer than the average of OECD member countries (1,687 hours). Korean workers worked 576 hours longer than German workers who worked the shortest hours (1,332 hours per year) among OECD members. When Mr. Moon Jae-in, the former President of Korea was elected in 2017, he promised to realize “1,800 annual hours worked” within his term. But his promise eventually could not be kept. It is true that the average annual hours worked in Korea decreased since the regulation on the maximum of 52 working hours per week had been applied to workplaces with 300 employees or more and finally went below 2,000 hours in 2018. Some people evaluate the current situation to be promising based on this statistic. However, it is dangerous to evaluate a complicated reality based on only average values.

It should be kept in mind that part-time and marginal part-time work could affect the appearance of decreasing average working hours. According to the Economically Active Population Survey by Statistics Korea, the number of marginal part-time workers who work for 1~14 hours per week almost doubled from 840,000 in 2011 to 1,510,000 in 2021. The number of marginal part-time workers has sharply increased considering that it was 960,000 in 2017. Marginal part-time jobs are mainly concentrated in vulnerable populations such as women, old people, and people with a middle-school education or less. In addition, these jobs are excluded from legal protections such as allowance for holiday, retirement benefits, and social insurance. According to Moon and Kim (2017)[3], marginal part-time work has been rapidly growing among lower-educated and elderly women, particularly among bereaved or divorced women, contrary to the expectation of the government that encouraged part-time work for work-family balance for working mothers or for middle-aged women who experienced career interruption. In the case of married women, there are more cases of women unwillingly choosing marginal part-time work because they cannot get the job they wanted, or they must earn a small amount of money for living, rather than choosing marginal part-time work for the advantage of short working hours for child-care or housekeeping.

Vulnerable workers who are desperate for a living take low-quality marginal part-time jobs. On the other hand, they sometimes choose long working hours for more income. According to an analysis in the Korean Labor & Income Panel Study (1998-2014) by Shin and Hwang (2016)[4], long-time workers who work 58.3 hours per week earn 6,680 KRW (Korean won) per hour (~USD$5.36 or €4.99) while standard-time workers who work 41.4 hours per week earn 13,200 KRW per hour (~USD$10.59 or €9.85). According to the Survey report on labor conditions by employment type in 2020 by the Ministry of Employment and Labor, a ‘regular worker’ worked the longest (179.8 hours per month) with the highest total hourly wage[5] (20,731 KRW or ~USD$16.63 or €15.47) among eight different types of employment.[6] In contrast, an ‘agency or subcontract worker’ worked the second longest (173.5 hours per month) while their total hourly wage was the lowest (12,338 KRW or ~USD$9.90 or €9.21). When the analysis was limited to male workers, the monthly working hours of agency or subcontract male workers was the longest at 186.9 hours, while regular male workers worked 182.1 hours.

In summary, the gradually decreasing average working hours in South Korea does not have only a positive meaning. It is a critical challenge in Korean society to pull vulnerable workers at both extremes towards standard working hours.

‘Decent’ working hours for all workers

While labor issues were generally ignored during the 20th presidential election campaign, at least the issue of the four-day workweek gained some attention. However, the benefit of a national four-day workweek system seems to be very limited under the current dual labor market. It is especially true considering the experience that it took twenty years or more to be able to regulate the maximum overtime work even after adopting the forty-hour workweek system. Being captured by the rhetoric of the four-day workweek system without deep consideration of inequalities in working hours, it is easy to miss a more serious problem. It is important to ensure that the forty-hour workweek regulation in the Labor Standards Act can be applied to all working people.

Workers in the agriculture and fishery sectors are excluded from application of the provisions of the Labor Standards Act pertaining to work hours, rest times, and holidays (Article 63, Exclusion from Application, the Labor Standards Act). Transportation and health workers are also excluded due to special provisions (Article 59 of the Labor Standards Act, Special Cases concerning Work Hours and Recess Hours, of the Labor Standards Act). Workplaces in which less than five employees are regularly employed are excluded from application of the Act as a whole (Article 11, Scope of Application), even though their working conditions are the worst. Independent contract workers and platform workers (gig workers) are not covered either. All these workers deserve legal protection. The blanket wage system[7] which promotes free labor should also be addressed. Above all, sufficient income should be ensured so that everyone can enjoy good working hours. As Bernie Sanders said, “If you work 40 hours a week you should not live in poverty.”[8] Long working hours due to poverty should be eliminated by dramatically raising the minimum wage.