NAVER's labor union held a rally in the lobby of the company's headquarters, demanding that the parent company accept joint bargaining covering 15 affiliates as a single unit. The company has maintained that it has no authority to effectively determine working conditions at its affiliates, leaving the two sides at an impasse.
The NAVER chapter of the Korean Chemical, Textile and Food Workers' Union, affiliated with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, held the rally at noon on the 21st on the first floor of NAVER's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, with about 200 members in attendance. The union said it delivered a joint bargaining proposal covering 15 affiliated corporations in August but criticized the company for failing even to post public notice that a bargaining request had been made.
The company sent the union an official letter stating that NAVER headquarters does not have the authority to effectively and specifically control or determine working conditions at individual affiliates. At the rally, union members staged a symbolic protest by tearing up a large banner bearing that position.
The union argues that headquarters in practice dictates working conditions at the affiliates. "When headquarters posts a notice changing work rules, the affiliates post notices with identical wording within minutes, and the company calls this 'benchmarking' to deny its control," said Oh Se-yoon, head of the NAVER union chapter.
Union representatives also pointed to the inefficiency created by separate negotiations. "The affiliates cannot even put forward a proposal until headquarters reaches an agreement, and once it does, every corporation wraps up an agreement with the same wording within just a month. This distorted inefficiency keeps repeating," said Choi Chang-hoon, a bargaining representative at NAVER Cloud.
The union proposed that common agenda items actually decided by the parent company, such as funding for labor costs and performance-based compensation standards, be handled in base-level bargaining, while matters specific to each corporation be addressed in supplementary bargaining. "What we want is not unified bargaining outcomes but a unified structure in which we bargain with NAVER as a single employer," Oh said.
The union said it filed a request with the Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission on the 2nd of this month seeking corrective action over the public notice of the bargaining request, submitting 2,000 pages of material documenting NAVER headquarters' effective control, including its ownership structure, the affiliates' revenue dependence and the process by which working conditions are determined. Union officials plan to attend an in-person hearing scheduled for the 22nd.