비정규직노동의 자발성에 관한 경험적 연구

This study empirically examines involuntary contingent workers in Korea. Despite large volume of prior literature on the contingent work, little is known about how many contingent workers are involuntary. This study not only brings a new insight to the substantial feature of the non-standard employment arrangement which has increasingly grown across the countries. But, it also suggests an empirical criterion of workforce underutilization.This study empirically investigates voluntary/involuntary atypical workers, estimating individual workers' preference to standard and full-time jobs through the probit model. It uses the Korean Current Population Survey conducted by National Statistics Office (NSO) in 2004. The empirical outcome shows that the percentage of involuntary workers within the contingent work amounts to 49.7 percent. While 53.2 percent of the fixed-term workers are estimated as involuntary workers, the percentage of involuntary workers vary along with the types of alternative employment arrangement (ex. independent contractors (52.7 percent), part-time workers (50 percent), and temporary help agent workers (34.3 percent)). The estimation on the sample of competent contingent workers, whose labor market ability is equivalent to the regular full-time workers, reports that involuntary workers are as much as 62.8 percent in this sector. The large number of involuntary contingent workers implies that the contingent employment arrangement is more likely to undermine national competitiveness in Korea. In addition, increasing involuntary workers among competent contingent workers evidences serious underutilization of labor force.