The South Korean Parliamentary Committee recently proposed a new regulation that outlines guidelines for company hiring policies with regard to non-regular and regular workers.  The regulation restricts discrimination among non-regular and regular workers in terms of salary, medical insurance, and other benefits. Also, companies will be required to hire all non-regular or temporary workers as full-time salaried employees once they have worked at the company for two years.  The regulation will decrease the disparity between salaries for regular and non-regular workers.

The new law is expected to go into effect in late April 2006.  All companies that have more than 300 workers are required to fully comply with the law by 2007.  By 2009, all companies, except for those with fewer than four employees, will need to comply.
     

Skeptics claim that with this new law, companies will begin hiring fewer non-regular employees because they will not be able to afford to hire regular workers in the future.  Also, labor activists have been protesting the new regulation, claiming that big corporations will still be able to employ large numbers of non-regular workers and simply pay a fine for violating the law.