3rd Women's Labor Forum- 'Labor and Discrimination: focusing on European cases"

 

Korean Women Workers' Association (KWWA) and Korean Women's Trade Union (KWTU) have planned Women's Labor Forums four times.  The 1st forum dealt with equal pay for work of equal value in the U.S.A. and U.K., and the 2nd forum, equal pay for work of equal value in Korea. In this third forum, researcher Eun Soomi focused on equal pay for work of equal value in European countries.

In Europe, it is said that social supports for gender equality are basically strong, wage differences by size and employment type are smaller, and protection levels in accordance with collective agreements are quite high.  Korea experiences the lack of related regulations and practices and there are quite a lot of differences between Korea and European countries, and so, when Korea follows and adopts only the flexible trends of European countries and ignore its social and cultural contexts, there will be quite high possibilities to cause social problems.

European countries have already had the practices of equal pay for work of equal value and how to expand its application is a question. However, because there is no practice of equal pay for work of equal value in Korea, first of all, the question to define "what" is equal pay for work of equal value has to be discussed.

Eun Soomi suggested that Koreans should establish the practices of equal pay for work of equal value, and also made two suggestions to carry out job analysis under this irregular workers' discrimination correction system, and to make job analysis of irregular workers in women centered public sectors.

The more labor forum is held, the ambiguity regarding definition of equal pay for work of equal value rises. A wide variety of detailed ideas and practices are needed to implement the equal pay for work of equal value in the Korean society.