The National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) found it discriminatory to recruit and place production and technical employees working in the production field in actuality on the basis of gender in actuality and applying lower salary class to female-dominated occupations was wage discrimination based on gender. As such, the Commission recommended that the director of Hyosung Inc. (hereinafter Hyosung) amend the wage system and to pay the wages in arrears.
Twelve organizations, including a women’s organization named Hanulsory, filed a petition to the Commission in October 2007 claiming that “despite the fact that eight of the 5th-grade female production employees of Hyosung’s Ulsan factory had the same technical qualifications, academic qualifications, and technical abilities as the 5th-grade male employees and engaged in the same or similar kind of work with slight differences only in work schedules, applying a technical wage classification system to male employees and a production wage classification system to female employees thus paying lower salary to female employees was an act of discrimination based on gender.”
In response, Hyosung claimed that “the company did not recruit its employees classifying and separating them based on gender. Rather the differentiation between production and technical employees were based on differences in the technical abilities, efforts, responsibilities, and work conditions owing to differences in job duties. Even if there was a wage discrepancy between female production employees and male technical employees, this was due to differences in the value of job duties and thus was reasonable.”
The Commission concluded that the qualifications required for production and technical employees were the same in terms of technical abilities, academic qualifications, and technical qualifications. However, only women were hired and placed for production duties and only men were for technical duties confirming that production duties were treated as female exclusive occupational duty. Furthermore, the Commission found that there is no reasonable ground for the wage difference between production and technical employees who had the same or similar work experience and Hyosung’s claim that the wage difference stems from the difference in the value of job duties had no reasonable grounds as the comparison between technical abilities, efforts, work conditions, and responsibilities of technical and production employees had revealed. Based on these findings, the Commission recommended that Hyosung amend its gender discriminatory wage system and gender segregated recruitment system and pay the wages in arrears.
