A proposal has emerged to extend South Korea's planned "worker presumption" rule — which would treat a person who performs labor as an employee unless the business owner proves otherwise — into the administrative work of labor inspectors. That goes beyond the government's intent to confine the rule to civil litigation out of concern for the financial strain on small businesses. If the rule were applied to inspections, small workplaces would face a substantial burden of proof and a greater risk of disputes.
According to the National Assembly and labor groups on the 16th, the issue was debated a day earlier at a forum held at the National Assembly on introducing a worker presumption system as a national policy task and on applying the Labor Standards Act to specially employed and platform workers. The forum was co-hosted by senior Democratic Party of Korea members of the Assembly's Climate, Energy, Environment and Labor Committee, a Progressive Party lawmaker, and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.
The core of the worker presumption rule the Ministry of Employment and Labor plans to introduce as a national policy task is to presume a service provider to be an employee only in judicial disputes such as civil suits. The aim is to shift the burden of proof at the level of individual disputes rather than to broaden the substantive definition of an employee.
Some panelists opposed the government plan, arguing that disputes over employee status for non-standard workers are mostly settled at the stage of complaints to local labor offices, before cases reach the courts. Once the basic facts are established — that a person provided labor for someone else's business and was paid for it — a labor inspector should immediately treat that person as an employee and issue a corrective order, they said. Shin Ha-na, an attorney with the labor committee of Lawyers for a Democratic Society, said: "Most disputes involving workers are handled in complaints to labor offices before litigation. If the presumption is left out of administrative and wage subrogation procedures, only the few who can endure years of litigation will get relief." Jung Young-hoon, a professor at Pukyong National University, also stressed: "The first gateway for disputes is not the courts but the handling of labor office complaints and the Labor Relations Commission. Administrative innovation is possible only if the law explicitly applies the presumption to administrative procedures such as corrective orders by labor inspectors."
Extending the worker presumption rule across administrative procedures would impose an excessive burden on small self-employed business owners. According to Kim Young-mi, a senior researcher at the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Research Institute who took part in the forum, small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for 99.9% of all companies in 2024, or about 8.5 million businesses. Of those, 78.4%, or roughly 6.67 million, were one-person operations such as self-employed owners with no staff. "Given that small businesses and small merchants make up such a large share of the reality on the ground, introducing a statutory presumption that imposes a strict burden of counter-proof on business owners could run into resistance in the field," Kim said.
Panelists also pointed to the risk that the standard for a business owner to prove someone is not an employee could be set too high. A presentation by Cho Hyun-joo, an attorney at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' legal center, proposed requiring business owners to prove all four elements: the absence of integration into the business, autonomy over the work, the absence of direction and supervision, and the independent securing of clients. Jung said: "Requiring proof of a 'complete absence of direction and supervision' in ordinary contracts, where at least minimal work instructions exist, is effectively impossible. There is a risk the presumption degenerates into a 'deeming' provision that cannot be rebutted."
Another central issue was that labor inspectors also hold the status of judicial police officers, meaning administrative application would be directly linked to criminal procedure. A small business owner who fails to prove during the handling of a labor office complaint that the other party is not an employee could immediately face the risk of criminal punishment for violating the Labor Standards Act. "Measures should be prepared to reduce the scope for disputes through advance guidance on standard contracts and education, and to lower the burden of proof on business owners by designing a counter-proof procedure at a manageable level," Kim said. Jung also argued that "criminal procedures should be explicitly excluded from the scope of the presumption." Shin, by contrast, said: "Excluding criminal procedures across the board would neutralize even the relief function at the labor office complaint stage. A special provision should allow a defendant to contest the case by presenting rebuttal evidence sufficient only to raise reasonable doubt."
