Reconceptualizing the Employer and Redesigning the Collective Bargaining Framework under the Amended Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act

This article argues that the amended second sentence of Article 2(2) of the Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act (effective 10 March 2026), which reconceptualizes the statutory definition of the employer, necessitates a structural reconfiguration of collective bargaining frameworks to address increasingly multilayered labour relations. The existing statutory definition merely categorizes employers into three groups—business owners, management representatives, and individuals acting on behalf of the employer—leaving the substantive contours of the concept to judicial and scholarly elaboration. Academic theory and case law have long recognized that entities other than the contractual employer may constitute employers for the purposes of collective bargaining and unfair labour practice liability when they exercise substantial influence over working conditions. In decisions involving Hyundai Heavy Industries, construction daily workers, Samsung Electronics Service, and parcel delivery and manufacturing subcontracting arrangements, courts and labour commissions assessed substantive control over working conditions, functional organizational integration, the application of internal regulations and safety systems, statutory joint liability, economic dependency, and issue-specific influence over bargaining agendas in determining whether principal contractors qualified as employers.<br/> The amended provision codifies this jurisprudential trajectory by stipulating that an entity not party to an employment contract may nonetheless be deemed an employer when it substantially controls or determines working conditions. Accordingly, the employer in collective labour relations may include contractual employers, service-providing employers, and functional third-party employers lacking direct contractual privity. Determination of employer status must be grounded in the constitutional guarantee of collective bargaining rights. Working conditions must be understood broadly to include occupational safety and health, welfare benefits, employment status, major managerial decisions, and algorithmic management systems governing labour processes.<br/> The concept of substantial control encompasses legal, organizational, and technological mechanisms, such as subcontracting arrangements, operational directives, pricing and remuneration systems, production planning, resource allocation, and digital or algorithmic infrastructures. Multiple employers may coexist with respect to the same working conditions, requiring issue-specific analysis. This framework extends to platform–intermediary–platform-worker relations, where algorithmic management and economic dependency operate as distinct mechanisms of control.<br/> Such expansion necessitates restructuring collective bargaining structures. The enterprise-based single bargaining-channel system cannot accommodate multilayered employer structures and should be confined to situations involving multiple unions within subcontracted workplaces, thereby enabling representative unions to bargain with principal firms. Unified cross-enterprise single-channel rules risk procedural inefficiency and union exclusion. Therefore, legislative reforms enabling bargaining-unit integration across subcontracting structures are required to ensure meaningful collective bargaining.