Jung Hee Kwan(’14, Department of Psychology) said, “When I was a freshman, I had a part-time job during vacation. While working, I never got paid for my weekly paid holidays, so I reported it to the Ministry of Employment and Labor, and a few days later, I received my payment. Originally, I had no idea about weekly paid holidays, but thanks to my brother, who manages his own restaurant, I was able to learn about weekly paid holidays: If someone works more than 15 hours per week, they can get a paid day off once a week. However, I found out about this law a few days before I quit the job. Two weeks after I left my part-time job, I asked my ex-employer for the weekly holiday payments that he never gave me. Of course, he refused my request. This was the reason that I reported this situation to the Ministry of Employment and Labor in Chungju. Thanks to the law, I was able to get this payment right away.”
  This situation is not limited to CBNU students. Including day-off payments, the unpaid wage problem is not uncommon, and this problem is not just the case of part-timers in small companies. Recently, major companies, such as E-Land Group and Lotte Cinema, also have committed this offense.
  E-Land Group manages a number of famous brands in various business fields: food service, fashion and department stores to name a few. Some well-known brands are Ashley, Spao, and New Balance. However, recently, the food service department of E-land has been blamed for unpaid wages. According to the Ministry of Employment and Labor, at the stores directly managed by E-land’s food service department, they have been in arrears with part-time workers’ wages of about 8.4-billion-won. The ways that they used to delay and lower actual payments were requiring the workers to come to work earlier for the sake of staff training and deducting actual work time. For the purpose of staff training, they compelled the part-timers to come to work 10 minutes earlier than regular attendance time and did not pay for that time. Deducting the actual work time is reducing the real work time by measuring work-hours every 15 minutes. For example, if someone gets off his work at 7:13 PM, 13 minutes wouldn’t be included in his work time. In addition to part-time workers, about 90 billion won in wages have also been in arrears for regular workers. They were not able to get paid days off, overtime, or extra pay for night work. Due to these situations, criticism of E-Land has been posed relentlessly. Therefore, last January, E-land announced a public apology regarding these problems.
  In addition to the case of E-Land, there have also been wage problems in Lotte Cinema. According to a part-timer working for the Labor Union of Lotte Cinema, two different wage discrepancies have existed. The first one is reducing real wages, which is the same scheme that E-Land did. The second one is not considering the work preparation time as real work time. Plus, the union argued that Lotte Cinema has been using a 10-month contract for part-timers to avoid giving retirement payments because if someone works more than 12 months, the employer has to provide retirement pay.
  Other than E-Land and Lotte Cinema, the unpaid wage problem has happened quite frequently. There are some useful strategies that you can use when you are experiencing these problems. The safest and surest way is to visit the Ministry of Employment and Labor in person and report these problems. Of course, it is also possible to report the problem through its website. These days, you can also report these problems on the online job site called Alba-Cheon-Gook.
  As to the wage arrears problem and solution, Lee Young Man, a certified labor consultant for Tomorrow, a law office, said, “The most important safety net is to sign an employment contract, but in the case of an oral contract, part-time employees need to record the contents regarding the contract specifics and the basis of payment calculation. Moreover, it is more helpful to visit the Ministry of Employment and Labor with workers who have the same problems than to go alone. The process for making a formal complaint is not as hard as many students might think. This is because the Ministry of Employment and Labor goes through specific procedures to check whether wage discrepancies have occurred.”

By Min Byung-woo l bw38@cbnu.ac.kr
Illustrated by Park Han-na