통상임금에 관한 대법원 판례 동향분석

Currently the research on ordinary wages is very active in the field of labor law studies. This paper comprehensively analyses and examines all the decisions available of the Supreme Court on ordinary wages in addition to the existing researches on ordinary wages. Since it is the Supreme Court which practically and ultimately decides in disputes on wages, it seems meaningful to diachronically examine the trend of decisions of the Supreme Court. This paper makes 34 precedents of the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2012 where we can find the meaning of ordinary wages as the subject of analysis. The precedents are classified into the ones about definition of ordinary wages, range of ordinary wages and determination of whether individual allowances or extra pays are of ordinary wages or not to be analysed. As the result of this analysis, it is shown that the scope of periodicity, uniformity and fixity required for recognition of ordinary wages in the precedents has tended to expand. This trend, however, is not unrestricted. In relation to the determination of whether individual allowances or extra pays are of ordinary wages, the courts tend to recognize them as of ordinary wages when the condition of payment of the allowance or extra pay is determined by the offer of labor. If, however, there are more than one conditions for payment of some allowance or extra pay, then whether to pay it depends on if all the conditions are fulfilled, so it is not recognized as ordinary wages. It should be cautioned, however, that as this result is based only on the rulings of the Supreme Court collected and analysed, the cases in the lower courts may show a bit different tendency.