"If competitive hiring was conducted every year, employment relationships were severed"... court sides with local government

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\r\n[Financial News] A court has ruled that social workers employed by local governments are not automatically entitled to conversion to indefinite-term contracts simply because they worked for more than two years, as eligibility depends on the nature of each project.
According to legal sources on the 7th, the First Division of the Seoul Administrative Court, presided over by Judge Yang Sang-yoon, ruled on April 10 in favor of A local government in a lawsuit seeking to overturn a retrial decision by the chair of the Central Labor Relations Commission over wrongful dismissal and unfair labor practice relief.
The local government launched the Elderly Customized Care Service Project in 2019 under the Welfare of Senior Citizens Act and publicly hired five people, including B. When it later decided to outsource the project to the private sector starting in January 2024, it ended its employment relationship with B and the others in December 2023.
B and the others argued that they had already been converted to indefinite-term employees because they had worked for the local government for more than two years, and that the termination of their contracts amounted to wrongful dismissal. Under the Act on the Protection of Fixed-Term and Part-Time Employees, the entire contract period counts toward continuous service, and workers who exceed two years of employment are deemed indefinite-term or regular employees. The Regional Labor Relations Commission found the dismissal wrongful on that basis, and the Central Labor Relations Commission reached the same conclusion in the retrial. The local government then filed an administrative lawsuit to challenge the ruling.
However, the court sided with the local government, finding that the employment relationship ended each time the contract between the workers and the local government expired.
"The public recruitment process conducted by the local government each year involved a real competitive procedure, with unsuccessful applicants resulting from document screening and interview scores," the court said. "It cannot be viewed as a mere repetition of the existing contract. Rather, it should be seen as the formation of a new employment relationship, so the periods of continuous service cannot be combined."
The court also noted that the project was a job program funded by both national and local government budgets. It explained that it falls under the exception to the fixed-term employment limit set out in Article 4, Paragraph 1, Proviso 5 of the Act on the Protection of Fixed-Term and Part-Time Employees, namely a project that provides socially necessary services.
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kyu0705@fnnews.com Kim Dong-gyu Reporter