[Newsmaker] Tech firms under fire for toxic work environment

The South Korean IT powerhouses nestled in Pangyo Techno Valley, a tech hub modeled after Silicon Valley in the US, are best known for a progressive workplace culture shaped by young founders and their employees, something rare among traditional big companies.

That reputation has drawn the nation’s brightest IT minds south of Seoul to Pangyo in recent years, but the IT and tech startup cluster is now under increasing scrutiny after a series of reports suggested a reality contrary to the popular perception: about an employee who took his own life due to the stress of working for an abusive boss at Naver, about a pregnant woman forced to work overtime at Kakao, and about underachieving employees having their wages cut at Nexon.

On May 25, a man in his 40s who worked for Naver, the country’s biggest internet portal, was found dead near the company’s headquarters in an apparent suicide. A note found at his home by the police showed that he had suffered stress at work. The note had the names of several people on it.

“The deceased seemed to have suffered overwhelming stress from work and hierarchical abuse,” said an official from the labor union of Naver.

On June 1, Naver suspended four officials in connection with the suicide, including Chief Operating Officer Choi In-hyuk and the team leader who is suspected of being the main perpetrator in workplace bullying.

The catch is that Naver was aware of the team leader’s abusive actions but took no action for years.

Naver is currently investigating the case with an outside institution and chief executive Han Seong-sook said in an e-mail to employees on May 28 that she was taking the case “very seriously.”

Meanwhile, Kakao, the operator of the nation’s No. 1 messenger app, KakaoTalk, was found to have made a pregnant employee work overtime.

In April, the Ministry of Employment and Labor conducted an inspection at Kakao and found six violations -- making some employees work more than the maximum of 52 hours a week, making a pregnant employee work overtime, stopping some employees from keeping written records of their overtime hours and so on.

What set this inspection apart is that it was requested by Kakao employees. In February, a Kakao employee uploaded a message on Blind, an anonymous online community for office workers, saying he wanted to take his life due to stress stemming from the company’s personal appraisal system, which asks employees to pick “someone you don’t want to work with.”

This post sparked a movement among Kakao employees. After that, they received tips from each other and eventually filed an anonymous petition with the Labor Ministry.

Nexon, the country’s biggest gaming company, is embroiled in a fight with its labor union over slicing the wages of underachieving employees without their consent.

Recently, Nexon gave a standby order of three months to 16 employees and cut their wages 25 percent during that period.

According to Nexon, those employees failed to find new projects for one year and outside training will be conducted to help them find a new place. At Nexon, and at many other game companies, employees are grouped by projects. If a project is dropped, employees have to take interviews and find another project.

But the labor union says a project is dropped every two to three years, and that anyone can be subject to standby orders. Also, it says cutting wages without consent is unacceptable. The labor union is currently carrying out single-person protests outside Nexon’s headquarters.

“We have no intention to relate Nexon’s job insecurity issue with other companies’ workplace bullying issues. This is not about the wrongdoing of a particular company, but about solving the problem existing in the whole game industry,” said Bae Soo-chan, head of Nexon’s labor union.

By Kim Byung-wook (kbw@heraldcorp.com)