Non-regular Workers

Concept and Scope

Non-regular work is standardized neither internationally nor within Korea. The OECD defines only 'temporary workers' without further specification, because the causes of vulnerable worker strata differ by country. The English-language counterpart, contingent work (also casual work, gig work, contract work), is defined by limited employment security, performance-based pay and a non-permanent employment relationship, typically part-time with variable hours, and does not fully coincide with Korea's non-regular workers.

In Korea, the July 2002 Tripartite Commission defined non-regular workers by employment form as fixed-term or contingent workers, part-time workers and non-standard workers. Yet 'non-regular worker' is not itself a legal term but an ordinary one covering fixed-term, part-time and dispatched workers, and 'regular worker' is likewise not a legal term: the statutes speak instead of workers 'without a fixed contract term' and 'ordinary workers', contrasted with fixed-term and part-time workers respectively. Statistics Korea classifies workers by status in its main survey as regular, temporary and daily, and by employment form in its supplementary survey as fixed-term, part-time and non-standard. Labor circles take non-regular workers to be temporary and daily workers plus non-regular workers among regular employees, while the government, per the July 2002 agreement, includes only fixed-term, part-time and non-standard workers. The non-regular share therefore is not fixed by any single figure.

History

The institutional occasion was 26 December 1996. The Kim Young-sam government advanced its April 1996 'new labor relations' plan for capital deregulation and a flexible production system; after talks in the labor relations reform committee broke down, the labor law revision submitted to the National Assembly on 11 December was passed at 6 a.m. on the 26th by 154 members of the New Korea Party. The Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions immediately struck, three opposition parties filed a constitutional complaint for nullification, and after the 21 January 1997 leaders' meeting the revision was amended by cross-party agreement. The category then expanded sharply under the Kim Dae-jung administration after the 1997 IMF foreign-exchange crisis; the 1998 legislation of the dispatch system and the post-crisis surge are distinct events.

According to Statistics Korea, the non-regular share rose from 43.2% in 1996 to 45.7% in 1997, 46.9% in 1998, 51.6% in 1999 and 52.1% in 2000, then held in the 40s, reaching 32.9% as of August 2017. That series rests on Statistics Korea's definition and cannot be compared directly with the KLSI figure of 41.5%.

The employment shock is visible in turnover. According to the Korea Labor Institute, from October 1997 to April 2001 employer-initiated separations (layoffs, recommended resignations, contract terminations) reached 1.71 million at major firms alone, and the average annual involuntary separation rate rose from under 1% to over 7% (0.4-1.0% in October 1995-October 1997, 9.5% in October 1998-October 1999, 8.9% in October 2000-April 2001). The idea of lifetime employment vanished and phrases such as 'sa-o-jeong' and 'o-ryuk-do' came into vogue. In a KDI awareness survey (1,000 adults, multiple answers), 88.8% cited the growth of non-regular work as the crisis's greatest impact on present-day Korea, followed by deepening polarization, mass and youth unemployment, and the growth of petty self-employment; self-employment stood at 21.4% in 2015, 6.6 percentage points above the OECD average of 14.8%.

The non-regular worker protection law is the collective name for the Act on the Protection of Fixed-term and Part-time Workers, the Act on the Protection of Dispatched Workers and the Labor Relations Commission Act. Passed by the National Assembly on 30 November 2006, it took effect on 1 July 2007 for workplaces with 300 or more workers and was extended to those with 100 or more in July 2008 and five or more on 1 July 2009. The Act on the Protection of Fixed-term and Part-time Workers has been amended several times since it first took effect on 1 July 2007, but its main content is largely unchanged. Article 4 caps fixed-term use at two years in principle to prevent the employment insecurity that prolonged fixed-term contracts cause, and deems a contract with no fixed term to have been concluded once two years are exceeded. The dispatch act likewise limits dispatch to specified business categories (Article 5), caps use at two years (Article 6) and bars discriminatory treatment (Article 21). Current law limits only the period of use, not the grounds for it, and labor circles have continued to demand that grounds be restricted.

Some analyses credit the protection law with lowering the non-regular ratio, while discrimination-correction applications peaked at 1,296 in 2008 and then settled at around 100 a year from 2009. Most applicants are fixed-term workers, and the low volume is read as fear of disadvantage from filing. Labor circles have proposed allowing unions, rather than individuals, to file discrimination-correction requests.

Types

Major types include indirect employment, daily work, special employment and contract work. In indirect employment the primary contractor hires through a subcontractor, so employers are multiple (primary and subcontractor), and there are also second- and third-tier subcontractor workers. It spans shipbuilding, automobiles, construction, retail, cleaning and security, and workers paid less for the same work are pushed into relative poverty. When layoffs are carried out, non-regular workers are dismissed first.

Daily workers are paid by the day rather than the month, seen among construction workers, public-institution workers and bathhouse scrubbers; with short periods and repeated cycles of employment and unemployment, they are the most insecure. Special-employment workers contract as individual businesses, yet the company in practice directs the work and pays the wages, so they should be regarded as in an employment relationship; this covers visiting tutors, freight and construction machinery drivers, delivery truck drivers, postal consignment couriers and at-home consignment mail carriers, and their three labor rights are not respected. Contract (fixed-term) workers are directly employed for a set term, and open-ended contract positions without a set term have also appeared.

In dual labor market theory, labor market dualism is the segmentation between regular and non-regular workers. Regular workers receive higher wages, social insurance and high employment security, while non-regular workers receive lower wages, are less likely to be covered by social insurance and hold insecure jobs. The KEIA analysis defines non-regular workers as fixed-term (non-permanent), part-time and non-standard workers (including standby and subcontract workers), and this dual structure is deeply entrenched in the Korean labor market.

Scale and Gaps

KLSI data for August 2025 (Statistics Korea supplementary survey) put total wage earners at 22.41 million (up 270,000 year on year) and non-regular workers at 9.29 million (41.5%), up 60,000, with the share edging down 0.2 percentage points. By type, fixed-term workers numbered 5.34 million (23.8%), up 340,000, while part-time workers numbered 4.23 million (18.9%), down 30,000. International ranking depends on the measure: Korean Wikipedia states that as of 2021 Korea overtook Colombia as the country with the highest non-regular share, while KEIA puts the 2020 temporary employment rate of 26% second-highest in the OECD, more than double the OECD average of 11%. Because the two measures capture different things, no single unqualified 'highest' claim is warranted.

Hourly and monthly wage ratios differ. In the KLSI 2025 data, hourly wages over the past year rose 2.6% for regular and 2.0% for non-regular workers, widening the gap from 67.3% to 67.0% on an hourly basis and from 53.8% to 53.5% on a monthly basis. In 2020 the hourly wage of non-regular workers was 72% of the regular rate, and bonus coverage was 21% against 62% for regular workers, with bonuses accounting for about a quarter of annual income. OECD analysis finds the wage gap does not track skill (among those aged 25-64, temporary workers matched regular workers in literacy, and among those aged 16-24 they scored higher). Regular workers' separation rate was about 2.4% in 2016 against 18.8% for fixed-term workers. The 2007 law capped fixed-term contracts at two years and deemed workers regular at that point, but in practice conversion greatly raises employer costs, so most fixed-term workers are dismissed before reaching two years, and firms tend to hire new fixed-term workers rather than convert existing ones.

Social insurance coverage is also lower: in 2020, 62% for the national pension, 65% for national health insurance and 74% for employment insurance, well below the 90%-plus of regular workers, with corporate pension coverage under a quarter (59% for regular workers). Unionization among non-regular workers is under 1%, against 13% for regular workers, and fewer receive overtime pay. In 2001 data, hourly wages were 52.7% of regular workers', weekly hours were 50.5 against 47.1 for regular workers, social insurance coverage was 22-25% by employment type, and bonus, severance, overtime and paid leave coverage was 16-23%.

Wage inequality worsened alongside. The P9010 ratio between the top and bottom 10% widened in the KLSI 2025 data from 3.33 to 3.38 on an hourly basis and from 5.52 to 6.11 on a monthly basis. The low-wage stratum earning under two-thirds of the median reached 3.29 million (14.7%) hourly, up 140,000, and 4.5 million (20.3%) monthly, up 370,000. With the minimum wage rising only 1.7% (170 won), the share of minimum-wage beneficiaries fell 0.4 percentage points from 8.0% to 7.6%, while union membership rose 100,000 to 2.87 million, lifting density to 12.8%. Hong Min-ki of the Korea Labor Institute argues that structural problems of low employment and long working hours, market conditions such as globalization, and policy factors such as labor flexibilization combined to make income inequality extreme after the crisis; the income share of the top 10% soared from 32.9% in 1999 to 48.5% in 2015.

Labor Movement and Repression

Non-regular work has been criticized for existing to pay less and dismiss more easily. Workers receive 50-70% of regular pay for the same work, are excluded from regular workers' benefits such as commuter buses and discount purchases, and face low wages, long hours and precarious employment that ends when the contract expires. Regular workers have guaranteed employment for a set period and protection from unfair dismissal, while non-regular workers hold one- or two-year contracts and face many practical disadvantages in seeking renewal. Because firms can dismiss non-regular workers more easily, they live with job insecurity, and indirectly employed non-regular workers are dismissed if the subcontractor closes.

Labor circles have criticized union-busting: closing the company to dismiss workers who form a democratic union, or demanding withdrawal from the union as a condition of renewing the contract. Union membership is widely perceived as an implicit ground for dismissal and actual membership is extremely rare, and some argue this creates a vicious circle in which union activity is so hard that fighting unfair dismissal becomes harder still. In 2011 the Supreme Court ruled that a Hyundai Heavy Industries primary contractor's closure of all firms employing members of its in-house subcontract union constituted domination and interference with legitimate union activity and thus an unfair labor practice.

On 22 July 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that in-house subcontract workers employed for two years or more should be regarded as directly employed as regular workers by the primary contractor. The ruling came while dismissed Donghee Auto non-regular workers, fired for their labor activity, were fighting for reinstatement against the primary contractor Hyundai Motor, and is assessed as having influenced the labor history of non-regular workers. The court reasoned from the deemed-employment provision of the dispatch law. On 10 February 2011 the Seoul High Court ruled for the plaintiff in the retrial on remand brought by Choi Byung-seung, a union member dismissed after more than two years as an in-house subcontract worker on the Hyundai Motor Ulsan plant's upholstery line, against the Central Labor Relations Commission over unfair dismissal and unfair labor practice. The bench found that he worked alongside regular workers on both sides of the conveyor belt and that Hyundai decided the workload, method and order, so he was deemed directly employed after more than two years of dispatch. Hyundai Motor has nonetheless not complied with the ruling. The dispatch law caps the period and permitted sectors at two years and 26 sectors, yet in reality illegal dispatch occurs in direct manufacturing processes that the law forbids.

In 2015 the Ssangyong Motor non-regular union and Kia Motors non-regular workers were also recognized as illegally dispatched in status suits. The primary contractor should respect the deemed-employment provision and hire them directly, but by hiring them as new recruits without recognizing their careers it refused to honor the rulings. Facing employers who refuse, non-regular workers are pushed into disputes such as high-altitude sit-ins or sit-down strikes demanding direct employment in accordance with the rulings.

In 2010 Hyundai Motor non-regular workers at the Ulsan and Asan plants staged a plant occupation for regular conversion. They suffered wage discrimination at 60-70% of regular pay for the same work, personal humiliation, and demands to leave the KCTU metal union's Hyundai non-regular branch as a condition of renewal; management repressed them with violence mobilizing service contractors, and a non-regular worker in his thirties set himself on fire (not life-threatening). Afterwards the non-regular branch, the regular branch and management agreed to negotiate resolution of the illegal-dispatch issue, damages and the employment security of strike participants.

Donghee Auto, a Hyundai Motor in-house subcontractor in Seosan, South Chungcheong, employed only non-regular workers and was called a 'factory of blood' locally for wages 100 won above the minimum and dismissals for labor activity. Workers faced water cannon-style spraying under the pretext of cleaning and repression mobilizing service contractors and police, yet waged nonviolent struggles including a homeless sit-in and were reinstated in 2010. At E-Land's Homeplus, non-regular workers exploited at wages around 800,000 won were collectively dismissed when contracts expired. At Kiryung Electronics, non-regular workers notified of mass dismissal by text message waged a nonviolent struggle for direct employment in front of the company building, leading to negotiations. In January 2011 Hongik University collectively dismissed 170 indirectly employed cleaners, facilities staff and security guards through service contractors, sparking a dispute; they were paid 750,000 won a month with 300 won for lunch, and some students, graduates and outside figures supported the struggle with candlelight rallies and donations while the university ignored their rights struggle. GM Daewoo non-regular workers, dismissed in 2007 for forming a non-regular union, waged high-altitude sit-ins, hunger strikes and candlelight rallies for four years for reinstatement, agreeing on 2 February 2011 to reinstate 15 dismissed workers. Yet the negotiating party was the subcontractor rather than the primary contractor and the reinstatement period was unclear.

International Comparison

France has barred discriminatory treatment since 1981 and Germany since 1985. In the European Union, the 1997 part-time work directive banned discrimination on grounds of part-time status and applied the pro-rata principle. In European countries with social-democratic traditions such as the Netherlands and Denmark, the labor movement's history has meant equal pay for equal work, so non-regular workers face no discrimination. In the United States, by contrast, there are no rules requiring equal treatment between regular and non-regular workers, and employment form tends to be accepted as a matter of choice. Volkswagen in Germany is reducing non-regular work, converting 400 indirectly employed non-regular workers to regular status and scheduling about 2,200 more.

In China, non-regular work refers to jobs without a formal staff contract, covering the self-employed, street vendors, household handicraft producers and temporary contract employees of firms, including entrepreneurs. Non-regular workers in China were estimated at over 130 million as of 2006, and because they cannot receive social security, there are calls for institutional reform. In Japan, postwar industrial growth increased the hiring of housewives as part-time workers, and after the collapse of the bubble economy the Heisei recession brought cost-cutting pressure to reduce regular employment and expand non-regular hiring. The non-regular share first passed 20% in 1990, 25% in 1999 and 30% in 2003, reaching an average of 34.6% in October-December 2008, or one in three.

In England, when cotton mills appeared in Lancashire in the 1770s, workers labored six days a week on 12-hour shifts but were still paid by piece work, with fines for machine damage deducted from wages, and employers could hire and fire at will. This shows that the notion of a job performed at set times in one place was rare before the industrial revolution and is not a direct origin of non-regular employment. As manufacturing declined and many firms moved production to developing countries, staying competitive in hiring in Europe and North America required rapid dismissal and cost minimization, so employers turned to loopholes in employment law or bypassed union-negotiated terms, producing today's contingent work. Globalization strongly influenced the growth of contingent labor, generating rapid industrial growth, increased outsourcing, and the need for flexibility and agility to stay competitive.

Effects on the Labor Market

Labor market dualism leads to social exclusion and impedes growth. Non-regular work is concentrated among young, older and female workers, and women who leave regular jobs for childcare typically return as non-regular workers (47% of female wage earners in 2020 against 31% of men). This is a major cause of Korea's gender wage gap, the OECD's largest at 32% in 2020. Non-regular workers also have lower marriage, birth and savings rates, and non-regular households spend about half as much on education as regular households, receiving only 2% of employer-provided training.

Non-regular workers also face higher industrial accident risk. In the United States in 2014, fatal occupational injuries among contract workers numbered 797, 17% of all workplace deaths, though such workers are only part of the non-regular category. Reasons cited include assignment to dangerous tasks, inexperience, reluctance to raise safety concerns for fear of dismissal or disadvantage, and lack of safety training. As the foreign-exchange crisis was resolved, emphasis on employment flexibility made non-regular work surge, and workers pushed out of their jobs swelled the problem of subsistence self-employment; Kim Bok-soon, a senior researcher at the Korea Labor Institute, notes that without a re-employment system for wage earners after retirement, they concentrate in small subsistence start-ups.