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.