Livelihood of school catering workers is threatened

School lunch workers who have been diagnosed with lung cancer shed tears as they testify about their lung cancer screening results and working conditions at the National School Non-Regular Workers\' Union conference hall in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, March 14, 2023.(Photo is not directly related to the article) Han Soo-bin

"I don't get paid for two months of the year, and if they don't allow me to work part-time, how am I supposed to make a living?"

Ms. Kim, 51, who works as a catering worker at a school in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, feels helpless to make a living when the school is on vacation. This is because catering workers do not receive wages during school vacations, but instead receive only a separate bonus of about 500,000 won.

Kim said on January 28, "The workers don't get paid much. It's a per diem concept that only pays on working days, so it's around 100,000 won a day for the third year," adding, "Even if you work longer, you only get 20,000 to 30,000 won more."

"I tried to get permission from the school to work part-time at a convenience store during school vacation, but they didn't approve it," she said. "The reason was that if I get injured, the school has to find a substitute worker who is hard to find.”

She added, "In the end, I had no choice but to find a job with bad conditions because I have to look for a workplace where I could work undeclared and not covered by the four major insurers. It's hard to hire a school catering worker because of its high-intensity, low-wage structure, but instead of trying to solve the problem, schools and the government put the blame on the workers."

The livelihood of school catering workers is threatened. Schools do not allow the workers to do part-time jobs during school breaks when they are not paid. Currently, the Office of Education does not allow school catering workers to work concurrently, so if they want to work part-time during vacation, they must separately obtain approval from their principals.

According to a survey conducted by the Gyeonggi Province branch of the National School irregular union from January 11 to 14, 2,910 out of 3,314 respondents (87.8 percent) answered they needed to work during vacation, as in Kim's case. However, only 247 had actually submitted a part-time work permit to their schools.

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.