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영어

Article 29.2 Section 1 of the current Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act compels trade unions to participate in the procedure for the simplification of bargaining windows irrespective of their organizational types, if there are multiple trade unions within one business or one place of work. Before the introduction of this regulation, the violation of constitution by this act arose as a problem – that it infringed the right to collective bargaining and collective action by trade unions with a few members. As the Constitutional Court of Korea ruled that this regulation did not violate the Constitution in April 2012, it seems that the controversy of unconstitutionality has provisionally come to an end. However, apart from the protection of trade unions that have a few members, another problem is that the current law forces all trade unions to participate in the procedure for the simplification of bargaining windows by having workplace as a bargaining union regardless of their organizational types. For example, a branch of industrial trade union corresponds to a trade union organized by many workers within one business or one place of work and is decided to be a representative bargaining trade union. In this case, the industrial trade union is allowed to have diagonal bargaining only inside the place of work where the branch belongs to, and cannot have unified industrial bargaining in principle. Thus, the problem of procedure for the simplification of bargaining windows according to the current law is that it does not enable the workers of non-enterprise level trade unions, which go beyond the range of workplace as an organization, to achieve their original purpose of choosing such organizational type. The right to independent association guaranteed by Article 33 Section 1 of our Constitution is based on the principle of free establishment of trade union in essence. This means not only establishing, joining, or choosing a trade union to join but also determining organizational type must be based on workers’ free intentions. Therefore, enforcing the procedure for the simplification of bargaining window and preventing trade unions from achieving the purpose of choosing such organizational type infringes the fundamental principle of the right to independent association. Moreover, according to the review on interpretations so far, it is difficult to have Article 29.2 Section 1 as the basis of making non-enterprise level trade unions participate in the procedure of collective bargaining by business or workplace unit. To solve these problems, several amendments have been proposed in the National Assembly since 2012. However, they have limitations to solve the problems related the procedure for collective bargaining of non-enterprise level trade unions under the current system of multiple trade unions. Thus, it is necessary to change the interpretation of current regulation to make non-enterprise level trade unions not participate in the simplification procedure of bargaining windows for each business or workplace unit, or revise the current regulation accordingly.