A worker who is responsible for the provision of labor in a relationship with an employer is protected by various laws governing employment relationships. Public servants are protected by laws on the basis of election or appointment, and workers are p...
A worker who is responsible for the provision of labor in a relationship with an employer is protected by various laws governing employment relationships. Public servants are protected by laws on the basis of election or appointment, and workers are protected by labor-related laws that regulate the behavior of employers or ensuring means of self-protection through organizations called trade unions. And worker protection laws are determined by worker status. On the other hand, in exceptional cases, public officials can engage in commercial activities with the permission of the employer, and in some cases, they form individual employment relationships with multiple employers. And because of their status as a public servant, there is no need to protect individual employment relationships.
The problem is that protection laws applied according to worker status do not overlap each other. In other words, there is no legal way to regulate the employment relationship of persons who are both recognized as double employees. For example, when a person who has the status of a public official has an individual employment relationship with another employer by law or the permission of the person who has the right to hire, the law governing the individual employment relationship cannot be applied by the status of a public employee. As such, employers who have individual employment relationships with public officials do not have to fulfill their legal obligations to protect workers at a minimum, and cannot force them to protect workers. This is a major cause of failure to improve the individual working environment of public officials. Of course, there are cases where work is not adequately protected by law because it has characteristics that are difficult to evaluate by law. In the case of doctors employed in medical institutions, they are exposed to a non-waiting work situation such as an emergency or have a working type that makes it difficult to calculate working hours physically and because they are paid relatively high wages and have an independent form of work, it is difficult to fully apply the Labor Standards Act, and it is recognized as a long-standing work task of improving the working environment. The case of an adjunct professor at a national university hospital is a case of exposure to the two typical working environments mentioned above. He has the status of a public official as a professor at the National University College of Medicine, but he is engaged in commercial activities at the university hospital with the permission of the law and the right of appointment. nevertheless it is a problem that because of their status as a public official, they are not receiving adequate protection from various working conditions or occupational accidents based on the Labor Standards Act.
In this paper, the author recognized the need to protect individual employment relationships of public officials approved by the appointment authority, pointed out problems with unprotected situations, analyzed, evaluated and suggested several ways to improve them. First, if a public official who has been approved by the appointment authority has an individual employment relationship that provides non-official work to the employee, the employment contract shall be set as a mandatory requirement and the appointment authority shall confirm it in advance. Second, the scope of application of the Labor Standards Act should be expanded. This is because only those with worker status apply the worker protection law and should not be excluded from the application because they are public officials. Third, in cases where public officials engage in concurrent job activities with the approval of the appointment authority, essential conditions of employment and means to protect workers from occupational accidents must be provided by law. Fourth, if public officials themselves are permitted to work concurrently, the means and procedures for determining the employee and working conditions must be guaranteed by law, at least if there is an identical or similar occupation, the standard that the working conditions that are less than their working conditions are invalid must be established in the labor relations law. As reviewed above, in order to protect the employment relationship of a person with dual status, the law must provide a means of protection so that various problems due to the restrictions on worker status and the characteristics of the job itself can be improved. Through this, it is expected that the dual employment relation system of public officials can be established as a more practical work system.