Government’s Crackdown on Unjust Labor Practices: How Will the New Monitoring System Affect Your Job?
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The government will activate a standing oversight system through the end of the year in industrial complexes with dense concentrations of workplaces to eliminate excessive working hours and unpaid wages tied to misuse of the all-inclusive wage system.
The Ministry of Employment and Labor announced that beginning on the 14th it will launch an area-by-area \”relay inspection\” campaign focused on industrial parks where the all-inclusive wage arrangement is commonly used, with the goal of eradicating the practice of unpaid \”free\” labor that exploits the system.
The initiative reflects the government’s determination to implement the April-issued Guidelines to Prevent Misuse of All-Inclusive Wages and to signal zero tolerance for practices that deny workers their lawful compensation.
Under an all-inclusive wage arrangement, pay is set in advance and disbursed irrespective of actual hours worked. According to the ministry, the anonymous tip line for misuse of all-inclusive wages and fixed overtime logged 42 reports by the end of April — more than three times the 13 reports filed during the same period last year.
Accordingly, the ministry will activate a standing inspection regime in areas suspected of all-inclusive wage abuse to ensure the fundamental principle that workers receive full and fair compensation is upheld.
Inspections will concentrate on workplaces named through the anonymous tip line and on companies within those industrial parks suspected of legal violations. Authorities will inspect one region per month, beginning with the Guro and Gasan digital complexes. In the initial sweep, inspectors will prioritize firms accused of coercing overtime through verbal abuse and intimidation, a case in which a working mother who regularly logged more than 70 hours a week fainted, and companies alleged to have falsified clock-in and clock-out records.
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Following anonymous tips, officials will add one inspection region each month and carry out sequential checks. Rather than conducting isolated spot checks, the ministry aims to detect ongoing misuse by systematically linking reports to inspections.
The ministry will also mount a broad outreach campaign to raise awareness of the anonymous tip line for unlawful all-inclusive wage practices. It will deploy a mobile outreach bus to areas with many all-inclusive wage users to guide workers on using the tip line, and beginning on the 18th it will accept reports via Blind, the anonymous workplace community app.
Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said the ministry will scrutinize every workplace named in anonymous tips and will relentlessly pursue and sanction instances of unpaid \”free\” labor that undermine the labor value of young people and other vulnerable groups. He urged workers who have suffered exploitative or unpaid labor to come forward anonymously without fear.
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