As a result of numerical flexibility following the strategy of labor market flexibility, contingent work, which comprises over half of the total labor market, is a serious problem in Korean society. Contingent work applies to both women and men, but g...
As a result of numerical flexibility following the strategy of labor market flexibility, contingent work, which comprises over half of the total labor market, is a serious problem in Korean society. Contingent work applies to both women and men, but gender discrimination exists at the core. A high rate of contingent work in women's labor and the rapid emergence of numerically flexible workers in women's work clearly indicate that the problem of contingent work is lays within the realm of women's problems. According to labor flexibility strategy, permanent and full-time work is open to skilled workers and contingent work to unskilled workers. As a result, contingent workforce in the labor market are usually marginal work and are most often thought to be semi-skilled and unskilled work. In fact, contingent employees are stipulated and recognized as unskilled routine workers, which is how many employers justify their use of contingent workers. A problem emerges from regarding contingent workers as semi-skilled and unskilled and it is that it may underestimate all of numerically flexible workforce. The problem of contingent work is women's problem and underestimating contingent work leads to the underestimation of women's workforce which negatively influences the women's work market in general. Although it is clearly gender discrimination, it covers up gender discrimination by emphasizing discrimination against semi-skilled, unskilled contingent workers.
In order to show a connection between the problem of discrimination and underestimation of women's work and employment types, we need to examine whether the common idea of ‘contingent work = semi-skilled, unskilled workers’ is actually valid. Therefore, this study examines what types of work are turned into numerically flexible labor that exists in Korean society using related cases in hotels and examines whether women in contingent positions are actually semi-skilled and unskilled as suggested by the commonly held idea. The results from this study are as follows:
First, the outsourcing tendency of the hotel industry has not been achieved reasonably by means of an outsourcing strategy, but has instead focused on the work that were regarded to be unsophisticated in society. In this respect, Hotel A also outsourced all jobs, except for the manager and a few other positions of housekeeping department. Hotel A's outsourcing process was a process of gendered flexibility in which all women's work were changed to contingent work in a clearly gendered divisions of workplace.
Second, it was examined whether Hotel A appropriately chose core and periphery businesses for outsourcing as its initial strategy in order to suggest a problem as to the outsourcing subjects of the hotel industry. According to Hotel A's outsourcing strategy, the selection of core-periphery job is based on whether the businesses can directly influence a core product(a room) or customer service. When the housekeeping team, which underwent outsourcing from the housekeeping department, and the order-taking team, which remained permanent and full-time, were compared and analyzed by the above two criteria to examine which of the two are core job, the outsourcing team was closer to core than the permanent team. Therefore, it was revealed that the hotel's outsourcing was not carried out according to its outsourcing strategy, a core-periphery strategy, but was instead done by following their 'habitual practice' on the existing peripheral workers. ‘Habitual practice’ refers to how the housekeeping team, composed of women, was stipulated as an unskilled workforce. This echoes the underestimation of women's labor within our society as a whole.
Third, in order to suggest a problem exists with regard to the discrimination and underestimation of women's labor in different employment types, the women's job in Hotel A were examined to reveal whether they were actually semi-skilled and unskilled tasks. For this purpose, the skill level of the chambermaid, a woman contingent worker, and a room attendant, a male’s permanent work usually called houseman in other hotels were examined. The skill elements from the two job characteristic were extracted to compare the skill of chambermaids and room attendants. As a result, it was revealed that the contingent chambermaids were more skill than the permanent room attendants. This opposes the common idea that contingent work is semi-skilled and unskilled and clearly shows that Korean society has created this common idea to justify gender discrimination against women's work.
Based on the above results, women's contingent work has not undergone outsourcing because it is actually semi-skilled and unskilled, but because it is regarded as semi-skilled and unskilled because of a socially fixed idea. Therefore, it can be concluded that the numerical flexibility of women's work, through creating a common idea that contingent work is semi-skilled and unskilled, is a clear form of structural and systematic gender discrimination against women.
The significance of this study lies in that it reveals that discrimination against contingent work is not because of the contingent employment type, but because of sex discrimination against women's labor. As a result, this study made it possible to approach the problem of contingent work from the realm of sex discrimination. By doing so, we can uncover more women's labor problems that have been justified as the discrimination of employment types and propose various countermeasures to such problems caused by various prejudices and discriminations against women's work, such as wage differentiation.