More than half of part-time workers in Korea enter the workforce without signing a contract, a poll found Monday.

A part-time job portal Alba Cheonguk conducted a survey on 1,437 part-timers from May 12-19 to find out whether employers offered working environments in accordance with the Labor Standards Act.

Korean labor law requires all employers, regardless of their size, to distribute a contract to their employees for both parties to fill in. The contract stipulates wages, working hours and holiday arrangements, among other things.

According to the survey, 53.5 percent of the respondents did not sign a written contract when they started their part-time jobs, with most of them just verbally agreeing to working conditions.

Of them, 65.4 percent said that they did not sign a contract because their employers did not bring up the issue while 18.9 percent found it unnecessary and 15.2 percent were not aware of their duty to write a contract before offering their labor.

Ha Ji-won, 21, was a temporary worker who only made a verbal contract before starting a job at a convenience store in Seoul.

“My boss made no mention of signing a contract when I was hired,” said Ha, a university student in Seoul. “She just verbally and vaguely informed me of working hours, hourly pay.”

“When I asked my employer whether I can sign a written contract, she seemed very upset.”

Another poll of 597 companies by Alba Cheonguk from May 20-27 shed light on employers’ lack of awareness about settling working conditions in written form when hiring temporary workers.

Only 47.6 percent of the companies said they should and would sign a contract, with nearly 49 percent being unwilling to do so. Nearly 4 percent of the business operators did not even know that they had a legal obligation to write a contract. 

By Ock Hyun-ju (laeticia.ock@heraldcorp.com)