2. Human Rights Violations in the Workplace
A. Human Rights Status 2022
A workplace refers to any place where business or sales is conducted, and a workplace is
also a miniature “society.” According to data from the Statistics Korea, the number of workers
in Korea in 2022 is 21,724,000 (13,568,000 regular workers and 8,156,000 temporary
workers), accounting for 42% of the total population (51,558,441, as of Aug. 2022). This
shows that a substantial number of Korean people spend considerable time at work.
Human rights issues that arise in the workplace are not limited to labor rights issues. There
may be problems with other fundamental rights, such as the right to health, personal rights
and privacy, from long hours of work, workplace harassment and electronic monitoring at
work, etc.
Various human rights issues that occur in workplaces require even more special attention
for the vulnerable and social minorities. It is desirable that the relationships between workers
and employers, between workers and between workers and customers be equal, but many
workplaces in Korea are not so, depending on various factors. In such cases, problems such
as ‘forced consent’ and ‘blind spots in the system’ will occur.
Recently, with a rapid growth of delivery platform, elementary and middle school students
were found to be working part-time as delivery workers, with the IDs of their mothers, and
the use of child labor has been criticized as problematic by international standards. It was
asserted that E-Mart, a large discount store affiliated with Shinsegae, is forcibly
implementing overtime, nighttime, and holiday work for its employees. However, it is
necessary to look back on whether Korean society was interested in such issues from a
human rights perspective.
From this perspective, the report will consider the issue of human rights of nurses under
COVID-19, a college student’s lawsuit against the labor dispute of university cleaning
workers, the night labor problem of distribution center workers, and restrictions on toilet use
in the workplace for construction workers, etc.
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