KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Legislation related to women and family has developed at a very fast pace in Korea, and various legislative measures are being implemented for the reinforcement of policies concerning gender equality. Despite all these, no major changes are visible in reality for women. On the contrary, job insecurity and economic inequality, issues women in Korea experience, are deepening, and they are living in a society where the occurrence of sexual violence or sexual harrassment can be found in everyday news. Such a gap between law and reality, inversely, constitutes the reason why law and system are necessary. The problem is to build a structure where constant efforts to narrow the gap between law and reality can be made. Under the circumstances, this institute has been carrying out a 10-year research project from 2013 for the purpose of uplifting the effectiveness of legislation through gender-sensitive support of legislative activities in the Parliament, including enactment and amendment relevant to women and family.

This research intends to draw legislative tasks for Korea through the comparison and analysis of legislative examples of foreign states. Currently, interest in part-time employment is rising in Korea, and increase in the number female part-time employees is contributing to the increase in part-time employment. This phenomenon is displaying a fast speed of increase with the most vulnerable group, middle-aged or older women with low educational background, being at the center of it. Yet, current legislation on employment insurance sets conditions concerning eligible beneficiary of unemployment benefits that are comparatively hard for part-time workers to have access to. Therefore, improvement in the direction to strengthening the application of employment insurance to part-time workers is required. In this context, in order to draw the points that require improvement in The Employment Insurance Act, one of the social security legislations in Korea, this research examined legislative examples of foreign nations with ample examples of research and policy regarding the protection of part-time workers, and grasped the support policies of each nation.

In the case of Netherlands, one of the nations examined, where the rate of part-time workers is the highest in the world, employment of part-time workers make up 49.6% of total employment as of 2014. The employment insurance system in Netherlands was first introduced in 1949 with the enactment of ？Unemployment Insurance Act (Werkloosheidswet)？, and ？Act on the Prohibition of Discrimination according to Working Hours (Wet verbod op onderscheid naar arbeidsduur, WOA)？ of 1996 prohibits employers from differentiating between full-time and part-time workers. Accordingly, employment insurance in Netherlands, also, takes all the working hours of workers, regardless of full-time workers and part-time workers, as basis for application of employment insurance.

Secondly, in the case of Canada, while as high as 27% of the female workers aged 15 or older are part-time workers, only 12.3% of male workers are part-time workers as of 2014. Besides, since the second half of the 1970s the rate of women in the total part-time workers is 70%. With the reform of ？Employment Insurance Act？ in 1996, the basis for the eligibility to receive employment insurance benefits completely shifted from the requirement of weeks of work to that of hours of work. This change in requirement for it to be based on hours of work means that old requirement based on weeks of work is abolished, and all the working hours of employees, regardless of their working system, can be taken as the basis of the application of employment insurance.

In Germany, the third nation examined, part-time work has rapidly increased in a short period of time, during which most of the increase in the employment of female workers was due to the increase in part-time employment. In the case of Germany, the application of employment insurance is implemented through the partial unemployment benefit system. This partial unemployment benefit system was introduced in 1998 in order to address such cases where those employed workers who are obligated to be insured in many number of social insurance policies fail to receive unemployment benefits for the reason of them being laid off from some job posts or maintaining other employment relationships.

Lastly, in the case of the U.S., the total number of part-time workers was 27,587,000 as of 2014. Of them, 17,724,000 are women and 9,863,000 are men―the rate of female part-time workers accounts for some 64.2%. The application of employment insurance of part-time workers in the U.S. can be found in ？American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, ARRA？, which was signed by the President Obama on Feb. 17, 2009. Its main contents are ‘to expand the beneficiaries of unemployment benefits to the unemployed who work only part-time’ and ‘to grant unemployment benefits for additional 26 weeks to participants of job training programs,’ and ‘to expand benefits for the unemployed with dependents,’ etc

With reference to the trends in the legislative examples of those nations, the following implications were drawn. First, based on the fact that whether or not employers offer employment insurance makes big difference in the enrollment rate of part-time workers, education, and guide for employers regarding the enrollment of part-time workers in social insurances should be strengthened, so that blind spots in the enrollment in employment insurance of part-time workers can be substantially resolved. Second, reexamination of the exclusion of extremely short-time workers is necessary. Being excluded from employment insurance, a protection against unemployment, just for the reason of being extremely short-time worker, is excessive and subject to normative criticism that it does not coincide with labor legislation that prohibits differentiation against part-time workers. Therefore, of the number of measures being discussed to solve the problem, the measure of adding up working hours needs to be examined. Third, since the legislation and policies concerning employment insurance of Korea were designed with full-time employment as the model, they have limitations in reflecting the unique characteristics of part-time employment. Therefore, as confirmed in the examples of partial unemployment benefit system implemented in Germany and Netherlands it is necessary to clarify solutions to such irrational problems that uniquely part-time workers are likely to experience and the deprivation of eligibility for unemployment benefits. In addition, a reform should be made, so that current situation of supply and demand of non-regular workers, including part-time workers, and factors affecting the situation can be grasped through employment insurance database. Lastly, Netherlands and some states in the U.S. operate the system where employment insurance grants benefits to those who reduced working hours from full-time to part-time. Although Korea has the system that supports the employers who changed work system from full-time to part-time, the big difference is that no benefit is provided to the workers who made such a change. The policies of work-family balance assistance and creation of part-time jobs should be more positively promoted later, by considering the measure to pay benefits to those who reduce working hours.