The NHRCK(Chairperson Byung-chul Hyun) decided to state its opinion to the National Assembly on some controversial points concerning the amendment draft of the Framework Act on Employment Policy to relieve employment discrimination.
The Commission has decided that restricting employers from requesting documents irrelevant to job positions such as education, occupation, and property of family members from applicants is reasonable because such requests may lead to discrimination in the employment process. As an alternative to improve the situation, the Commission has recommended the use of 'capacity-based application' template provided by the Ministry of Employment and Labor.
The 'capacity-based application' template provided by the Ministry of Employment and Labor excludes education and family information and allows for only minimum requirement of personal information and insertion of information relatively more relevant to job positions such as curricular/extra-curricular activities, internships, certificates related to the job position, and awards. The template, if used by state organs, provincial governments and public institutions, may help prevent discriminatory practices in the employment process.
The Commission also saw it reasonable to include 'education' as cause of discrimination in times of recruitment and employment, stating that due to practices of the job market which tends to place more weight on education than individual capacity, job seekers may become overly obsessed with education and be deprived of opportunities at the initial stage of job seeking.
Also, adding education as a cause of recruitment and employment discrimination is reasonable considering the problems of excessive time investment to build unnecessary career experiences, wide income gap among education levels based on the culture that prefers higher education, side effects of high-education unemployment, and imbalance in supply of human resources due to education inflation.
However, on the claim to create new punishment provisions for discriminatory practices in recruitment and employment process for the Framework Act on Employment Policy, the Commission has state to rethink the issue.
If new punishment clause for practices of recruitment and employment discrimination is implemented, it may yield confusion because if there are separate, individual legislations on age, gender and disability, remedial procedures may overlap to undermine remedial effectiveness and increase cost of resolving conflict, and also because of the difference between remedial procedures that are based on individual legislations and those that are not. Also, the Commission has stated that, considering the fundamental principle of national employment policy (Art. 3 of the Framework Act on Employment Policy), it is more reasonable to promote correcting discriminatory practices by prioritizing procurement of broad social agreement rather than implement restrictions.
