Due to the changes in the industrial environment, such as the breakdown of bubble economy since 1990s and accordingly the long-term depression and the stagnant outcomes of companies, etc., the Japanese-style employment practices based on the core fact ...
Due to the changes in the industrial environment, such as the breakdown of bubble economy since 1990s and accordingly the long-term depression and the stagnant outcomes of companies, etc., the Japanese-style employment practices based on the core factors, such as long-term employment and seniority order and so forth that have been maintained until now are shaking unstable. Here, it is being pointed out that the major causes are the changes in the social and economic environments, such as externalization of workforce, increase of personnel expenses according to aging of employees and the intensification of competition between companies, etc. Under such situations, various kinds of reforms of the overall administration system have continously been implemented in the Japanese automobile industry in order to recover its profitability. The representative reforms are the performance-base human resource management and compensation systems. The reforms of the human resource and compensation systems which have appeared in the Japanese automobile industry since 2000 are being implemented in two types.
First, in the aspect of the reform of compensation system, the existing competence-based and seniority order-based compensation systems have been modified, so the introduction of concepts, 'job-based compensation', 'achievement-based compensation' and 'overall performance incentive' have appeared prominent while the reduction or cancellation of seniority order-based compensation has been driven by abolishing the job evaluation-based compensation item among the basic pay items and by introducing a fixed-sum system by each kind of qualification.
Next, in the aspect of the forms of the compensation system, the introduction of the job grade system focusing on the job-based compensation under which the grade and compensation level of an employee are determined based on the value of a job and the role grade system focusing on the role-based compensation under which the grades of roles and the compensation levels are determined according to the size of the role in charge under the existing job qualification system is getting to be apparent. The reasons for such changes are because the number of employees with high qualification increased along with the expansion of the middle-aged and old-aged groups as a result of the seniority order-based operation of the existing job qualification system and, especially, there was some introspection that only labor costs have increased because some gaps between jobs and qualification levels have been occurred.
On the other hand, some movements for revising the compensation system even in the Korean automobile industry also appeared at the same time. Entering the 2000s, the issues related to shortening of labor hours and cancelling of loboring late at night have appeared as some hot issues between the employees and the management while the Korean automobile industry labor union has raised the issues related to the employees' right to health, aging of employees, securing of stable compensation and the possibility that the domestic production volume can be reduced due to the increase in the overseas production volume. While the employees and management of K corporation agreed to introduce the weekly continuous two-shift system through collective bargaining in 2005 and agreed to implement the monthly salary system for blue workers through collective bargaining in 2006 and 2008, the conservation level and method of compensation items and the change into the monthly salary system and so forth that are connected to the shortening of the labor hours have appeared as the hot issues between the employees and the management.
In this thesis, it is intended to examine the directions of the responses to the changes in the social structures including the intensification of competition due to globalization, technological innovation and aging of population and so on in the Korean and Japanese automobile industries since 2000s by examining how the compensation systems change under the changing environments and by analyzing the trend of revisions of the compensation systems.