The suspected overwork loss of life of a 26-year-old worker on the well-liked bakery chain London Bagel Museum has reignited a fierce debate in Korea over whether or not employers ought to be required to trace work hours.
On the coronary heart of the controversy are questions concerning the worker’s precise working hours. The 26-year-old, who had been stationed on the firm’s Incheon department, was discovered useless within the employees dormitory in July, a day after ending a late shift.
The bereaved household alleges he had been pushed to work practically 80 hours per week, typically skipping meals and getting just a few hours of sleep.
The corporate denied the declare, insisting his schedule didn’t method 80 hours. It argued that because it operates inside fastened enterprise hours, extended extra time is unlikely to happen regularly.
The labor ministry started an inspection of London Bagel Museum and its Incheon department on Oct. 29.
The federal government is pushing forward with plans to mandate work-hour recording, and the labor minister has harassed the necessity to implement the requirement at once.
“It is unnecessary {that a} nation with superior IT capabilities nonetheless can not mandate the recording of working hours,” Labor Minister Kim Younger-hoon mentioned Thursday throughout a gathering with the press.
“Within the case of London Bagel Museum, we had been capable of hint the worker’s actions displaying practically 80 hours of labor,” he added, emphasizing that obligatory work-hour monitoring ought to be carried out on the earliest attainable time.
Underneath the present labor regulation, employers should not required to trace or report workers’ precise working hours.
Nonetheless, calls to make such record-keeping obligatory have been raised for years.
Throughout the Moon Jae-in administration, the push to mandate work-hour monitoring was included within the nationwide coverage agenda. Though the federal government pledged to introduce the requirement, the plan stalled and was by no means totally carried out.
The difficulty resurfaced underneath President Lee Jae Myung. He pledged to impose obligatory recording of precise working hours, and the dedication was later mirrored within the labor ministry’s briefing to the Presidential Fee for Nationwide Agenda Planning.
The Korean Democratic Labor Celebration holds a press convention in entrance of the London Bagel Museum’s Anguk department in Jongno District, Seoul, Oct. 30. Yonhap
Consultants emphasised that logging employees’ begin and finish occasions is usually a primary safeguard towards overwork.
“On the very least, we’d like a system that information when workers begin and finish their shifts,” mentioned Kim Sung-hee, director of the Employees’ Institute of Trade and Labor Coverage and a professor of labor research at Korea College.
“If it isn’t obligatory, firms can go away information clean or manipulate them at will, leading to gaps and omissions.”
There are considerations that pushback from small companies might complicate efforts to mandate time monitoring. But the price of implementing such techniques is not a significant barrier, as monitoring units have turn out to be extensively out there and reasonably priced.
On the similar time, critics warn that any mandate mustn’t evolve right into a type of digital surveillance that tracks each motion of employees.
“Extreme monitoring techniques can increase severe human rights and labor rights points,” Kim mentioned. “Even when logging employee hours turns into obligatory, safeguards have to be in place to make sure it doesn’t result in digital surveillance.”
London Bagel Museum mentioned that it manages workers’ working hours via a digital system and shift schedule. The corporate acknowledged limits in monitoring all branches, noting that the present system depends on self-reporting.
In response, it mentioned it could speed up plans to undertake a brand new time administration system able to real-time information synchronization and stopping missed entries.
