회사법적 관점에서 바라본 노동이사제의 쟁점과 전망

Abstract

Human beings have been able to develope the society and economy for a very long time by accumulating capital, technological development, and incessant work. However, the First Industrial Revolution, which started in the middle of the 18th century, enabled the masses of the people to enjoy the fruits of mass production. On the other hand, capital and labor, which are the two pillars of economic growth, began to conflict with each other due to various problems such as profit sharing. Especially, with the emergence of corporations, ownership and management were separated, resulting in conflict between management representing capital and workers representing labor. As a result, the conflict between employers and employees became more serious and spread to social problems. And this conflict of labor and management is spreading as a serious social problem in Korea. One of the reasons is that, since the independence against the Japanese occupation, the ideological confrontation between leftists and rightists has been occurring ever since in this country. In order to solve these industrial relations problems, we have implemented various policies and legal systems such as tripartite commission of labor, management, and government for many years, but it is no exaggeration to say that there was no effective solution when considering the reality so far. In this paper, I studied the worker director as a solution for the industrial relations problems from the experimental point of view. In this paper, the reason why I suggest worker director system as an alternative for the solution of industrial relations problems is that I assumed the primary cause of confliction of between labor and management is a long-running feud between the capital and labor, and thus I thought if both labor and capital actively participate in management and communicate with each other, these profound industrial conflicts can be minimized. As reviewed in this paper, stockholders’ right of the power to appoint and dismiss board of directors is the most important right of stockholders, and therefore restricting that should be more cautious. Also, according to the legal system in Korea, executives are the upper limit of the level at which workers can effectively participate in management. Therefore, in order for workers to participate in management beyond this level(i.e. board-level), new legislation should be enacted. In this process, however, various problems such as conflict with the stockholder’s rights and equity with other creditors may be raised, so it is necessary to pay attention to according with the current legal system as much as possible. In this paper, from this point of view, I proposed the worker director system that it can vote for only specific issues(i.e. participating the interested parties model) instead of investing workers with the right of the power to appoint board of directors(i.e. worker director system model equivalent to the board-level director that is selected by stockholers). This is a way of utilizing the “Committees within Board of Directors” under the current Commercial Act(Article 393-2 of that Act). In other words, a Labor & Management Committee composed of three or more directors shall be established within the board of directors for a listed company with a certain size or more, and one or more of them shall be elected as a worker director(but within a third of the board’s membership). And the Labor & Management Committee shall make decisions on matters concerning working conditions that is entrusted by the board of directors. In this way, I tried to avoid clashes with stockholders’ rights and to balance equity with other creditors. Additional consideration is needed on matters such as the duties, responsibilities, and remuneration of worker director, and also needed on whether they can join a company union. It is also necessary to redefine the object of collective bargaining and labor disputes. In addition, it is necessary to review the penalties in case of non-obligation to install worker directors and the introduction of worker directors system in public enterprises and bankrupt companies is an additional consideration.