[Editorial] Part-time employment

The government is rushing to put in place its part-time job scheme to attain President Park Geun-hye’s promise to boost the nation’s employment rate to 70 percent from the present 64.2 percent.

The government’s plan calls for the creation of a total of 930,000 part-time jobs by 2017, 40 percent of the 2.4 million jobs it needs to produce to meet Park’s campaign pledge.

On Tuesday, the government organized a job fair to help private corporations recruit part-time employees. A total of 82 companies affiliated with 10 business groups participated in the fair to hire 10,000 employees.

Earlier this month, the government also unveiled a plan to create 16,500 part-time jobs in the public sector by 2017. The total breaks down to 4,000 jobs in the central government, 9,000 in public organizations and 3,500 at public schools.

The government emphasizes that the new part-time jobs are different from the existing ones. Under the plan, employees will work four to six hours a day and be allowed to decide their own work schedules.

Although the new jobs are basically contract positions, employees will be treated the same as regular workers in terms of hourly wages. They will also be entitled to the four social insurance benefits ― health, pension, employment and industrial accident coverage.

These jobs are mostly for two groups of job seekers ― women who want to return to the workforce after years away due to marriage or child care, and retired seniors who want to use their expertise.

This means both public and private companies that introduce the new part-time employment system are supposed to hire these job seekers in addition to the young college or high school graduates they recruit each year.

If companies simply turn existing regular jobs into part-time positions, they may boost the employment rate, but at the cost of degrading the quality of jobs. Labor organizations are worried about this possibility.

The success or failure of the government’s part-time employment strategy depends on whether companies will be able to use the newly hired employees in a way that boosts their productivity.

This means they need to create jobs tailored to the new workers. This will take time. If the government rushes to introduce the new system, companies will have to adopt it even if they are not ready. Then the result could be regular jobs for young workers being replaced by part-time jobs for women and the elderly.

To avoid such an outcome, the government needs to provide support for private and public companies to design their part-time jobs in a way that changes the existing paradigm of work.