우리나라의 고령자 고용 관련 법제 검토

Abstract

South Korea is aging faster than any other developed country. South Korea is expected to become a super-aged society in three years, with people 65 and older accounting for more than 20 percent of the population. However, its public pension systems like the national pension program or basic pension program fail to guarantee old age income security, leaving a number of the elderly in a labor market even after their retirement. In order to promote the employment of the elderly, the Act on Prohibition of Age Discrimination in Employment and the Elderly Employment Promotion has some provisions for supporting and promoting the employment of the elderly. However, the followings are the current issues related to this Act. First, this Act sets the retirement age of workers at 60 years of age or older, which is relatively low compared to those of OECD member countries. Second, under this Act, employers may continue to employ aged people as a fixed-term employee even after the aged people have worked for more than two years. Third, when a user company employs aged people as a temporary agency worker, the user company has no obligation to directly employ the temporary agency workers even though the user company continues to use them in excess of two years. Against this background, this study proposes three measures to protect the elderly employment, which is necessarily reviewed at this point. First, it is necessary to extend the retirement age for the following reasons: there are some time gaps between the age eligible for public pension benefits and the retirement age; the Supreme Court ruled that the pension age is age 65; OECD member countries are raising their retirement age (to 67 in Germany and Spain and to 70 in Japan); and South Korea is aging at the fastest rate in the world. Second, this study proposes the amendment to the Act on Prohibition of Age Discrimination in Employment and the Elderly Employment Promotion to enable the elderly who are newly employed after the age of 65 to apply for unemployment benefits by repealing the provisions for raising or excluding the age excluded from application to 70 years old. This is largely because the economically active population aged 65-75 accounts for 10.4% of the economically active population aged 15 or older and 7 in 10 seniors desire to work until age 73. Third, the exemption from the application of the Act on the Protection of Fixed-term and Part-time Employees rather allows the elderly to remain on a fixed-term contract and the exemption from the application of the Act on the Protection of Temporary Agency Workers also allow the elderly to remain on a temporary contract. Thus, this study proposes the amendment to the relevant law. Under the amendment, if a fixed term employee or a temporary agency worker continues to be employed in excess of five years, the fixed term employee shall be regarded as a worker who enters into an employment contract without a definite term and the temporary agency worker shall be regarded as directly employed by his/her user company.