KHMU Info No. 8(released on August 18, 2017)

The Year 2017 Fact-Finding Survey on Union Members

 

The KHMU conducted a fact-finding survey on working conditions and workers’ consciousness and collected 28,663 responses for two months from March. The survey results booklet was released in August.

 

The survey showed that healthcare workers didn’t have a room to take full rest and leave/vacation due to serious shortage in personnel. A high number of responses revealed that workers’ health condition worsened compared to last year. In addition, for the question regarding “shortage in personnel expose workers to accidents and disease”, the score reached 57.9.

 

Around 75% of the respondents said that they had to work on the night shift six times per month at average and a half of the total respondents were found that they had to skip at least one meal per week at average.

 

In addition, according the survey, respondents also experienced verbal abuse (48.7%), physical violence (8.5%) and sexual harassment (8.0%) by physicians, patients and patients’ family. Workers’ level of satisfaction on their jobs was low in general, leading them to think of leaving the hospital jobs.

 

The survey also found that the average weekly working hours was 47 hours, including overtime work (five-day workweek system based). Given that the overall average working hours per week in Korea has decreased to 43.6 in 2015 from 45.1 in 2010, healthcare workers’ working hours has maintained the status quo, being 47 in 2015 from 46.4 hours in 2010.

 

Under the circumstances, only 14.5% said that they received ‘the entire remuneration’ for overtime work, while 56.2% said ‘not at all’ and 29.3% said ‘some’. And this result affirms the need to generate more jobs by cutting working hours.

 

Out of the total respondents, 79.9% were women with 34.5% in 30’s and 31.1% in 20’s. And 90.9% were permanent workers. By job categories, nurses represented 57.7% (16,488), taking the largest portion and nursing assistants, 5.9% and radiological technologist, 5.3%.

 

56% are shift workers and 40.6% are full-time workers. Out of the shift workers, three shift workers are 50.1% while two shift ones, 5.8%. Most of nurse work three shifts.

 

As for the yearly wage, those who said their wage reached between 35 mil KRW and 45 mil KRW represented the largest portion (29.2%) followed by 25-35 mil (21.2%), 45 - 55 mil (19.7%), and 55 mil - 65 mil (11.2%). Meanwhile, those whose yearly wage went over 65 mil represented 5.6% of the total.

 

See the articles at English page;  http://bogun.nodong.org/english/

KHMU info_08(20170818).pdf