노조 전임자 근로시간면제제도의 쟁점과 과제

On Jan. 1, 2010 Korean Assembly enacted Amendment to the “Trade Union and Labor Relations Act 1997”(hereinafter referred as “TULRA”) which allows establishing multiple trade unions in an enterprise and limits the amount of union officials' time-off paid by the employer. This paper deals with the legal problems of newly introduced time-off system for union officials. In Korea, since most trade unions have been organized in an enterprise level, and therefore the size of trade unions is too small to burden the payment of their full-time union officials, there has been a wide consensus the existence of trade unions would be almost impossible without some financial assistance from the employer. However, widely spread practices of employer-paid full-time union officials have been constantly criticized by some academics and mainly by employers because the practices cause undue and excessive burden to operation of enterprises. In considering these critics, the TULRA provisions that rule the relation between full-time union officials and payment by employer are radically changed from unlimited allowance of employer-paid full-time union officials to the time-off system. In the new system, newly-established 'Time-off System Deliberation Committee' which consists of 15 members including 5 employer members, 5 labor members, and 5 public members will set the amount of time-off. This paper suggests that this new system will fail to fulfill its purposes to reduce the amount of employer-paid full-time due to its some immanent limitations. Under the new system, since the amount set by the Committee cannot have direct binding effect on collective bargaining agreements, it rarely has the possibility to reduce the financial burdens of employer-side, and it would violate the autonomy of labor relations because it allows administrative authority to set the numbers and amount of time-off union officials that should be freely bargained by the trade unions and employers.