The headquarters of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power. [Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power]
The headquarters of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power. [Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power]

A Seoul court has ruled against 2,490 employees of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power who sued the company claiming they were underpaid during their time as hiring-track interns.

The 42nd Civil Division of the Seoul Central District Court, presided over by Chief Judge Choi Nu-rim, recently ruled in favor of the company in the damages lawsuit brought by the 2,490 employees.

The plaintiffs were hired as full-time employees after completing the company's hiring-track intern program between 2012 and 2018. Korea Hydro ran the program in accordance with the Ministry of Economy and Finance's operational guidelines for the public institution youth intern system.

The employees said that while working as interns they performed the same duties as full-time staff but received only 80 percent of the starting salary for new hires. They filed a lawsuit in November 2023, claiming they had also been denied base bonuses, performance-based pay and welfare points.

The court, however, found it difficult to conclude that the interns had performed work substantially identical or similar to that of full-time employees.

"Hiring-track interns, unlike regular employees, were in principle barred from using the company's internal work systems and had no access rights," the court said. "As a result, it was in effect impossible for them to perform the same work as full-time employees."

The court added that the evidence submitted was insufficient to establish that the plaintiffs had engaged in the same or similar work as full-time staff during their internships. Even if the discriminatory treatment the plaintiffs alleged did exist, the court said, it could not conclude that the company had treated them unfavorably without reasonable grounds solely because they were fixed-term workers.

The court also said the statute of limitations had expired. Taking into account that the wage discrimination issue had been discussed at Korea Hydro's labor-management council, the court found it reasonable to conclude that the employees had been aware of the alleged discriminatory treatment by no later than December 2018.

Because the lawsuit was filed in November 2023 — more than three years after that point, exceeding the statutory three-year limitations period for wage and damages claims — the court ruled that this provided an additional ground for rejecting the claims.


bbo@heraldcorp.com