[Screenshot captured from SBS News footage]
South Korea's labor ministry said Monday it has launched a special probe into the demeaning treatment of workers who were forced to face the bathroom walls in office for rejecting early retirement.
Three employees from Husteel, which produces and markets a variety of steel pipes, quit in October las year under pressure from their management, but they were reinstated after labor authorities intervened.
Their humiliating ordeal began last month when they came back only to see their desks relocated to face the walls of the office bathroom. With no work to do, they had to stay in the chair and watch the walls during their work hours.
"I've thought about quitting many times, but I've endured it because I cannot be pushed out after receiving injustice treatment like this," one employee said in an interview with SBS, a major TV station.
Their complaint of an injustice caused a social outcry and had far-reaching repercussion on the Internet, prompting labor authorities to take action. "It's an intolerable misconduct that followed our recommendation," Jung Ji-won, a labor ministry commissioner, told reporters.
This was not an isolated case. There have been sporadic reports of similar cases depriving office workers of basic human dignity when disputes erupt over an "honorary" retirement system widely used by South Korean firms for redundancies.
In March, Doosan Corporation Mottrol, a hydraulic components manufacturer, was vilified for giving a 47-year-old employee a seat facing a file cabinet for refusing to retire early.
The man lost his duties and was given a solitary desk in front of a row of staff lockers, with his desk and chair arranged in such a way that he was facing the lockers.
Sitting in the chair for eight hours, he was given only a one-hour break for lunch and a 15-minute break twice during the day. He was not allowed to leave his seat for more than 10 minutes without reporting, and no personal conversations on the phone.
Human rights activists argued that white-collar workers have been insulted and humiliated by some company chiefs when disputes erupt over honorary retirement.
A bill pushed by President Park Geun-hye to introduce greater labor market flexibility hangs in limbo in parliament due to a bitter standoff over how to reform the labor
market.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
