KHMU and Hospital Employers’ Association make the 2008 CBA

KHMU made the 2008 National Collective Agreement with the Hospital Employers’ Association on 26 August 2008. The negotiation started in April and has continued for four months.

- Industrial Minimum Wage should be increased to 950,000 won (around 930 USD) per month.

- The wage increase rate for irregular workers should be higher than that of regular workers.

- Meat suspected of mad cow disease should be banned in hospitals.

- Fresh agro-livestock products should be provided in hospitals.

- Joint cooperation to improve the medical evaluation system which the government is in charge of.

- The Charter of Patient Rights and the National Health Insurance System should be more actively publicized by hospitals.

- Mechanism and tools to eliminate workplace violence should be introduced and strengthened.

- A meeting of the National Labor-Management Council should be immediately be held.

Part-time professors continue demonstration before National Assembly

Part-time lecturers in Korea have been demonstrating and lobbying for over a year to restore status to their work and gain rights including wages comparable to their full-time professors. A series of suicides this year and last year have brought some negative attention to work conditions for lecturers at university. Even after spending years to get their degrees, they are treated unequally at the unversity compared to full-time professors. They teach 40% of all college courses in Korea but receive less than one-third of the the salary of full-time professors. They rarely have contracts and often are hired or dismissed with a phone call.

Now the National Assembly is considering to offer part-time lecturers the four main insurances (pension, health, unemployment and industrial disaster) and a raise in the salary to 60-70,000 won per hour (about US$60-70 per hour). Currently part-time lecturers earn only about 40,000 won (US$40) per hour.

The Education Committee in charge of the matter promised to the National Human Rights Commission to resolve the matter through legislation by the end of the year, but has only tabled the issue limiting the proposal to providing insurance and raising the salary by some amount, but rather than proceeding earnestly to legislation, has called for yet further informal hearings, and passed responsibility back to the Education Ministry for looking into. It is seen by the part-time lecturers as evasion of responsibility for the matter, and they fear they will need to continue their sit-in protests before the National Assembly for a few more years.

Source: Union of Irregular Professors and Global Voices Online