기간제 근로자와 경영성과에 관한 연구

Fixed-term Employment Workers and Firm Performance

본 연구는 우리나라에서 기간제 근로자의 활용이 경영성과에 어떠한 영향을 미치는 지에 대해 실증분석 결과를 제시하고 있다. 지난 1990년대 이후 특히 1997년의 외환위기를 겪은 이후 비용절감과 고용유연성 확보라는 기업의 입장을 반영하여 비정규직은 급격하게 증가하였다. 이후 기간제 근로자를 포함한 비정규직은 다양한 고용형태로 변화하면서 고용불안과 저임금 등과 같은 사회적 화두로 제시되고 있다. 하지만 광범위한 비정규직 활용에도 불구하고, 비정규직 활용에 대한 전반적인 재무성과에 대해서는 실증분석이 미흡한 상황이다. 특히 본 연구에서 다루고 있는 기간제 근로자의 활용과 재무성과의 개선에 대해서는 실증연구가 거의 없는 형편이다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 2005, 2007, 2009년의 사업체패널조사 자료를 바탕으로 횡단면 분석과 종단면 분석을 시도하여 그 관계를 분석하고자 하였다. 분석결과 예상과는 달리 기간제 근로자의 활용이 기업의 재무적 성과의 개선이나 조직문화개선에 그다지 긍정적인 영향을 미치지 않는 것으로 나타났다. 물론 본 연구결과를 일반화하는 데는 신중할 필요가 있으나 일반적으로 인식되는 비정규직 활용과 비용절감 및 재무성과 향상에 대해서는 좀 더 신중한 해석과 접근이 필요하다는 시사점을 주고 있다고 하겠다.

After the foreign currency crisis in 1997 the number of nonstandard workers rapidly increased in Korea. Companies argued that the use of nonstandard workers was unavoidable in order to improve employment flexibility and reduce labor costs, necessary competitive measures in a borderless global market. The use of nonstandard workers has since become a critical social issue in Korea, resulting in high job insecurity, low wages, and next-to-nothing benefits. While the use of nonstandard workers clearly has a social cost, market-oriented theories including transaction cost theory, resource based theory, and real option theory support the use of nonstandard workers as an efficient way for improving firm performance. In other words, companies use nonstandard workers to improve financial performance with employment flexibility. This study analyzes data from three years of the Korean Workplace Panel Survey (WPS) conducted by Korea Labor Institute (2005, 2007, and 2009) in order to establish the relationship between use of nonstandard workers - specifically fixed-term employment workers of one year or less - and qualitative and quantitative measures of financial performance among Korean firms. Among nonstandard workers, fixed-term employment workers are the key point of this paper. fixed-term employment worker is defined as a worker with fixed employment contract of at most one year. The contract can be renewed only once as a fixed-term employment worker for the maximum of two years by the law. In practice, many contract workers should leave the companies because newly coming workers replace incumbent workers. Companies are reluctant to keep incumbent workers because they worry losing employment flexibility with higher labor cost. Earlier studies on nonstandard workers in Korea were focused on the attitude difference between regular and nonstandard workers. Then the focus was moved to the wage and other HRM related issues and then finally moved to the factors determining the use of nonstandard workers. Labor cost saving, union avoidance, and labor flexibility improvement are listed as major factors using nonstandard workers. Past research regarding the effect of using nonstandard workers on financial performance has been inconclusive. In Korea, one study determined that using nonstandard workers reduced a firm's operating profit ratio, while another study showed that temporary employment and fixed-term employment workers improve financial performance. The latter study pointed out that temporary employment is effective way to maintain workers with updated skills only under rapidly changing environments, conditions different from the situation of typical nonstandard workers in Korea. And empirical results of a variety of studies support the timely use of temporary workers to improve financial performance by avoiding overuse of labor especially for specific, simple jobs. The other study shows using nonstandard workers in 14 European Union countries, only work-away-fromthe- office type of four flexible work types improves profitability and service quality and productivity. However, using European countries data, are search argues that externalization of labor including flexibility and outsourcing is not use ful for improving firm performance. Another recent study using Spain manufacturing companies shows the use of temporary workers lowers labor productivity but do not improve the return of sales at all. From HRM perspective, nonstandard workers are not motivated to work harder because of low possibility for contract renewal. But there are many types of nonstandard workers including fixed-term employment workers, part-time workers, dispatched workers, outsourcing, and independent contract workers, Another point is voluntariness for nonstandard work. This characteristic is used to explain inconsistent empirical results on the effect of nonstandard workers on financial performance. This paper measured the result of using fixed-