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영어

‘Resting time’ means the time when an employee is completely free from the command or order of an employer during working hours and is guaranteed free use. Under Article 54 of the current Labor Standards Act, employers are obliged to give the employee resting time of more than 30 minutes for working hours of four hours or more than one hour for working hours of eight hours under the heading “recess” (Section 1). Resting time is a time that employees can freely use (Section 2). In addition, Article 110 stipulates penalties for breach of duty to grant resting time, and the resting time system is backed by enforcement regulations that can’t be avoided by the free will of labor contracting parties. However, the first “Labor Standards Act”, which was enacted as Law No. 286 of 1953 5 10, had the same resting time provisions as the current regulations in Article 44, except for the penalties at the time of violation. Since then, the “Labor Standards Act” has undergone a number of reforms related to various working conditions, but the resting time provisions have been the same as those at the time of the original enactment, except for the penalties for violations. About 70 years have passed since the resting time system was introduced for the first time. In the meantime, Korea has changed its industrial structure and various jobs and occupations have emerged accordingly. In this way, it is doubtful whether the resting time system, which has long defined the same contents under complex and diverse conditions, can perform its role efficiently. However, there are few studies related to the rest time regulation and operational feasibility. This study was made for the purpose of reviewing the contents and application problems of the current rest time system from various perspectives. For the detailed contents of the study, first, the problems of the operation of the resting time system were classified into the resting time length, the assignment and arrangement. Based on this, the validity of the current regulations and the conventional interpretation theory was examined. Next, the issue of changing the resting time was examined in relation to the procedure of changing the rules of employment. If the employer wishes to change the length of the resting time, this should be done through the change of the rules of employment. However, shortening or expanding the length of the resting time is not necessarily disadvantageous or advantageous to the employees, so this is examined with the concept of “staying time at work”. Finally, as the number of part-time workers has increased considerably, the applicability of the current resting time provisions for these part-time workers has been examined.