Would you rather be contingent, casual or irregular… or perhaps just flexibilised?
A fairly intelligent piece in the Korea Times today on the problems currently facing unions in Korea and specifically the Federation of Korean Trade Unions which is celebrating (perhaps not the appropriate word) its 60th birthday.
Interestingly the author comes up with a new translation for that tricky word 비정규직 (which I usually render as casual employment), calling such employees ‘contingent workers’, which is perhaps better than the cumbersome ‘irregular workers’.
Also two interesting facts the writer drops in: Korea now has the lowest rate of unionisation of any OECD country (France is the lowest apparently) and the rival and more radical umbrella union group, the KCTU is now, unofficially at least, larger than the FKTU. This is because the civil servants union has affiliated to the KCTU, although it officially remains illegal.
