The National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) decided that it is discrimination to set age limit for consignee applicant in the public sector and thus recommended “A” Rapid Transit Corporation and the Korea Post to reform relevant system to prevent discrimination based on age.
“A” Rapid Transit Corporation set age limit when hiring consignees for subway station
The “A” Rapid Transit Corporation (“A” Corporation) only accepted applications from people who are 60 years old or below as of the announcement day when a call for application was released on May 2012 in order to select consignees for 11 stations.
The NHRCK views that fixing the possible maximum age of applicant for consigned operation of a subway station is discrimination based on prejudice against senior citizens that aging is loosing ability or becoming absolutely incompetent even though it is important to reinforce safety for subway users. Also, age limit varies among the same kinds of consigned work, which shows the lack of validity of standards of age limit. Entrusted business, in terms of age limit, is not comparable to regular employment system which consists of various payment factors such as pay step and pension.
The Korea Post set age limit when hiring consignees for its counter
The Korea Post established new guidelines for postal service station on 1 September 2009 which limits consignee’s age to 70. Subsequently, 130 persons who are above 70 years old will resign from their position of a head of postal service station as of 31 January 2013.
The NHRCK decides that it constitutes discrimination to uniformly impose age limit when selecting consignees taking it into consideration that data processing and heavy mails can be dealt with other employees at the station, 13.8% of heads of postal service station (106 persons out of 768 in total) is above 70 years old and still carries out duties as of May 2012, and performance evaluation is carried out when selecting a consignee.
As demonstrated in the aforementioned two cases, the NHRCK recommended improving the situation because it constitutes discrimination without justifiable reason against the elderly citizen based on prejudice to restrict consignee applicants to people who are 70 years old or below.
