In South Korea, "Non-Regular" Employment is Killing Part-Timers

“After I tried to overcome various obstacles for four years, I finally found a place to rest here in Austin. …The reason why I am writing this is to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. …Social irregularities cannot only be solved by plausible slogans. These irregularities and contradictions made me abandon my passion towards study and teaching.”
This is part of the will that the local police found in the room of a former part-time lecturer in Korea. On February 27, 2008 a Korean part-time lecturer, Han Kyung Sun died in a hospital in Austin, Texas. According to the local police, they found three pages of her last will and testament. In the testament, Ms. Han wrote about the sorrow of part-time lectures and the irregularities in the employment of professors in South Korea. Last month, a part-time lecturer (43, female) of the French Literature Department at Seoul National University committed suicide. Following two suicides—a lecturer in the Russian Literature Department in 2003 and another lecturer in the German Literature Department at the same school—it’s the third death in a human sciences department at the school. The school insists it is due to “depression,” but people around them have different opinions. Since 2000, six part-time lecturers have committed suicide. All of them cited a common reason, which was worry over the unstable income that lecturing jobs at universities offered.
A part-time lecturer said, “When those two lecturers killed themselves, the school laid the cause of death as depression and didn’t care. But what led them to suicide is not just simple depression, but the cruel reality that they face.”
The lecturer who died this time had been working as a part-time lecturer for a while, but being a professor is a path that seemed to take forever. She worked as a lecturer at other schools, but the salary was low. In addition, she had another disaster as she went through a medical operation. She was found dangling by her neck at the school right after the Chinese New Year.
There are a series of suicides of part-time lecturers, ‘non-regular employees on campus.’ On the 27th of December last year, a lecturer at a college went back to the U.S. where he obtained his degree, and committed suicide there. In his will, he criticized unequal treatment toward lecturers and expressed sadness, “I spent 4 years in order to jump off an invisible barrier… Without any economic support, it’s impossible to remain as a part-time lecturer for several years.”
In Korea is 65,399 part-time lecturers teach 40 percent of all college classes in Korea. To illustrate, 64.3 percent of the liberal arts courses are taught by lecturers. This, in other words, shows that part-time lecturers at Korean universities are teaching two thirds of the courses in the Liberal Arts Department. Another factor in this issue is that part-time lecturers teach a lot of one or two hour courses. When considering this, it becomes clear that their share of the lectures is even higher than what has been predicted. Moreover, part-time lecturers in Korea are teaching 24.7 percent of majors at the graduate schools according to Kyosu Newspaper. Part-time lecturers are essential to the Korean university educational system. But their treatment is the worst of irregular jobs. Other part-time job employees receive 50-55 percent of the salary of the same regular jobs, but part-time lecturers receive less than one-third. The lecture fee of the part-time lecturers at national and state universities is about 40,000 won (US 40 dollars) per hour. A lecturer who teaches western art at Seoul National University said, “last semester, I taught a three hour class and received 420,000 won (U.S. 420 dollars) per month.”
Until 2006, the maximum wage a lecturer, who has doctoral degree, could receive per hour was 50,000 won. This is about half of what the Korea Irregular Professors Union (KIPU) requested in 2004. KIPU’s 2004 request was 93,931 won, which was the standard living costs of a couple at that time. Moreover, it was found that 56.4 percent of investigated universities had an hourly wage of less than 30,000 won.
As part-time lecturers are irregular workers, their rights are not secured. As a result, the lecturers created their own union, KIPU, to protect their rights. KIPU’s major objectives are improving the quality of university education, improving irregular professors’ socioeconomic status, protecting their democratic rights and so on. Despite the union, employment is extremely unstable. A part-time lecturer at a private college said, “In the new semester, if the school calls me, then I can teach. Otherwise my contract is done. A research assistant informs us by phone.” Kim Dong Ae (62) who leads a part-time lecturer labor union said, “if the salary doesn’t come on time and I call the administration, they answer why we bug them with such tiny money. We have to put up with this unequal treatment, but nowhere can we complain about it.”
Kyosu Newspaper pointed out problems from the point of view of lecturers. To start with, university authorities use various criteria when they offer wages to lecturers. According to Kyosu Newspaper, the criterion is composed of the position, previous research and lecture career, the class size and so on. These criteria are often applied by private universities.
In the case of Korea Aerospace University, a private university, part-time lecturers are divided into two groups of A and B. The lecturers are divided by the criteria of their degrees, lecture career. Specified criteria for hourly wages made a huge difference in individual lecturers’ wages and annual income. Assume that there are lecturers A and B. Both of them have three classes which are three credit classes and they give lectures for 16 weeks. If A receives an hourly wage of 50,000 won and B receives 20,000 won, their annual incomes have about a 10,000,000won difference. Lecturer A has an income of 14,400,000won while B has an income of 5,760,000. This assumption shows that even among lecturers their incomes vary.
At present, the Education Committee of the National Assembly is considering a revised bill to improve the treatment of part-time lecturers.[…]
In order to better understand the situation, a reporter interviewed the former head of the SungKyunKwan University (SKKU) Irregular Professor Union, Shim Se Kang. When asked about the present situation, Mr. Shim pointed out three major problems. First, although lecturers are teaching 50 percent of the classes, they are not regarded as teachers because they usually do not have a contract. As SKKU has a union, their hourly wages are among the highest paid in the country, but that’s still only 53,000 won (US $53) per hour. Another problem that Mr. Shim mentioned is the zero-sum society. The haves, professors, receive all the support from their universities for their study and research. However, the have-nots, part-time lecturers, even have a limitation on the number of lectures they can teach. Lastly, lecturers rarely teach classes which are related to their major. Mr. Shim said that the distribution of liberal arts courses and even major classes is often done randomly so that lecturers seldom teach what they have studied. In other words, the chronic irregularities of our society are now causing inefficiencies, so that students cannot use high-quality human resources.
During the interview, Mr. Shim said that the problems concerning part-time lecturers have continued for a long time. Regardless of the difficulties in solving problems, Mr. Shim stressed two solutions. First, lecturers and professors should be compared and evaluated in terms of their accomplishments…. Students often envy their teachers who stand at the podium. However, not every teacher on that platform is satisfied with his or her situation. Behind the smiling face of the teacher, part-time lecturers hide their hardships in life. Just because they are not a regular professor, it does not mean that they are not teachers. Therefore, the government, the universities and most importantly lecturers must try hard to find a solution to this situation. For some, like Han Kyung Sun who killed herself in Austin, Texas, it may mean the difference between life and death.