무보수 노무공급관계에 대한 노동법적 검토 - 무급 인턴의 법적 보호방안을 중심으로 -

Nowadays, youth unemployment in the Republic of Korea become more and more harsh. Although young people may get jobs fortunately, the quality of these works are not decent. The number of young people who have not decent jobs have increased, for example unpaid internships. A lot of employers use unpaid interns and take advantage of them. Furthermore these phenomena become general and universal. In many cases, unpaid interns are not treated as employees because the original purpose of labor supply is not earning wages but getting an education or training, gaining work experience, doing volunteer work and so on. The Labor Standard Act defines the employee as “a person, regardless of being engaged in whatever occupation, who offers work to a business or workplace for the purpose of earning wages.” Therefore whether what we call an 'unpaid intern' is a real employee or not is the key point and the legal protection of Labor law including the Labor Standard Act depends on it. First of all the most important thing is to establish the standards that differentiates the employment relationship from other non-employment relationships among unpaid intern relationships. The standards must be substantial and concrete. This paper shows that unpaid interns relationships can be broadly divided into three legal categories: labor contract, education or training contract, volunteer service. For this, it is necessary to review and reconsider the definition of an employee in the Labor Standard Act. In case that unpaid interns relationship is decided as labor contract, a same legal status as employees is guaranteed to the unpaid intern.