한 기업, 두 노조, 두 임금: S호텔 복수노조 임금차별 사례 분석

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide empirical evidence suggestive of wage discrimination between multiple labor unions within a firm based on a case study of S hotel in South Korea, and second, to discuss the effectiveness of current remedial system for this type of unfair labor practices. In 2017, the S hotel started to apply the performance-based salary system to all of its employees through the collective agreement with union B, the bargaining representative union in the hotel. At the same time, the average annual wage of the union B was raised by 0.250 percent, but that of union A, a minority union in the hotel, was reduced by 3.833 percent. The regression results of this paper show that the difference between the average wage growth rates of the two unions is still large and statistically significant even when factors such as individual workers’ occupations and years of experience are controlled for. In contrast, the Korean National Labor Relations Commission has accepted the employer's argument that there was no unfair discrimination, thereby rejecting the union A’s request for relief. This paper also presents empirical evidence showing that this judgment of the commission might have not been appropriately derived. First, it did not restrain the employer’s improper response behavior such as insufficient data provision and false claims. More importantly, it failed to notice the employer’s fatal mistake: he misunderstood his own regression results and presented them as evidence for no discrimination, which in fact strongly indicated the presence of unfair discrimination. The results of this case study suggest a need for more effective institutional measures against unfair labor practices.