earticle

영어

Korea introduced the 40-hour workweek system on July, 2004 to reduce working hours of employees and to improve their value of life. In this respect, in order to make corporations more competitive and to provide employees with convenient opinions, Korea started various working systems, such as flexible working hour system, selective working hour system, special provisions for computation of working hours, etc.
This author has examined problems of current working hour systems, which have been done for last five years. In addition this author has studied its improvement of the working hour systems and has finally attempted to provide basic guidelines to solve the working hour problems.
First of all, this author has analyzed various flexible work-hour arrangement systems and its previous history of the European countries.
Secondly, this author has examined a variety of working hour legislations and its international perspectives. In this part, this article mainly focuses on the EU Working Time Directive, discussions of Germany, France concerning revision discussions. In addition, this author has showed legally fixed working hours, harmonization between family and work, work sharing.
Thirdly, this author has probed problems of current working hour systems in Korea, and then has provided guidelines to solve them as follows: the most important thing is improvement of long-term works. If working hours should be shortened, and various working hours are to be managed, family life and work life of employees could be harmonized. In this respect, firm attitude of the current Fair Labor Standards Act must be fixed as flexible according to types of works. In addition, the hardened working hour systems have been criticized for prohibiting different wage systems. Thus special provisions for computation of working hours must be widened.