자원봉사자에 관한 법적 쟁점의 연구

Today, many people are doing volunteer service activities personally or in organizations. According to the Framework Act on Volunteer Service Activities, the principles of non-compensation, spontaneity, public interest, non-profit and so on are suggested as the requirements of volunteer service activities. Sometimes a very small amount of honorarium is paid as a token of gratefulness to volunteers. Additionally, Korean government is running government-funded job policy that sponsors organizations for them to recruit volunteers and let them do social service activities. Recently, in many cases, paid volunteers who participated in this job policy demand minimum wage or severance payment and insist they are legally protected employees. The issue is whether they are volunteers or statutory employees. Employee under the Labor Standard Act has the requirement of compensation on his/her work. It is the controversial issue whether or not paid volunteers also satisfy the requirement of compensation. If the paid volunteers cannot be seen as employees, there may occur the phenomenon that volunteers substitute employees. On the other hand, if the paid volunteers can be seen as employees, there may occur the concern that volunteer service activities would shrink. Therefore it will be an important point how to determine the requirement of compensation. In this article I analysed and reviewed the requirements of volunteer and employee by studying how to determine the existence of compensation.