A Working Environment that Gives Alba Workers As Little Rest As Possible

My Alba Work Story: Dreaming of 10,000 per hour

By Lee Seung-ju

Published June 21, 2017

Translated by Marilyn Hook

※ Editor’s note: Ilda is recording the real experiences of young women doing alba [part-time, temporary, or side] work. The “My Alba Work Story” series receives funding from the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.

I’m the first alba worker here to have a labor contract?!

Even the “awesome” job at the popular bakery 

didn’t come with a labor contract.

The first time I did alba, it was at a large branch of a small chain of bakeries in a provincial tourist area. I was smitten with the fact that they paid 1,000 won [about 0.90 USD] more per hour than minimum wage, that I worked from morning to afternoon and so had my evenings free, and that they gave us lunch for free. But the first flaw I found at that “awesome” job was that they didn’t have labor contracts for alba workers. I mean, no matter how temporary your job is, you need a labor contract.

I asked the person who handled the documents there why they didn’t have labor contracts for us. She were flustered, perhaps because she hadn’t expected the question, and went hastily to look for the branch manager. The manager pulled out a labor contract, filled in some of the blanks, and told me to read and sign it.

Unlike what my coworkers had said, the contract had a clause saying that I would only receive 90% of the normal rate of 7,000 won (the hourly wages of that year) for the first month, because it was a probationary period. By the standard of the time, that was easily over the minimum allowed for probationary period pay, so I signed the contract and gave it to the manager. But if I hadn’t suggested making a labor contract, I would have been paid 7,000 won per hour from the start, as the manager had told me. At first, I regretted this fact; but still, it was important to me that there was solid evidence of when I was supposed to work and how much I was supposed to be paid.

I found out later that I was the first alba worker at that workplace to have a labor contract. This was surprising. Sure, it was the countryside, but such a big place not using labor contracts as a matter of course...! Their failure to keep even the most basic of basic rules was dispiriting.

After I signed my contract, the hourly pay for the first month at this business was lowered by 600 won for those who followed. When I asked people who started after me, they said that they were paid around 90% (6,400 won) of the regular hourly wage (7,000 won) for the first month as part of a probationary period, and their pay was 7,000 won per hour after that. 600 won per hour for 6 or 7 hours a day, 2 days a week, 4 weeks in a month – it comes to 28,800 or 33,600 won. An amount that would mean giving up more expensive real food to eat gross school cafeteria food or make do with convenience store food, just going home instead of stopping at a café and getting a coffee, hesitating or giving up on buying new things like books, clothing, writing tools, or cheap electronics. An amount that would make you cut your spending on the things you need for daily life, and put off buying things you didn’t absolutely need.

Labor contracts must be made. When I saw that claiming my basic right had resulted in the sudden appearance of a probationary period with lower pay, I wanted to quit that job immediately. Still, it was alba too good to pass up, given that it left me free to work as a tutor on the side and that it was the rare place that had high hourly wages in an area where a lot of businesses didn’t even reliably pay the minimum wage.

Why can’t I take a rest?

The place where I did alba was near a tourist spot. The bakery itself was also famous. A few weeks after I started, university students began coming on their summer break, and workers began stopping by during their vacations. Suddenly, a lot of people thronged to the bakery. It was there, doing alba, that I learned that there were this many people in the world traveling for fun and spending money. After I finished work, I would marvel at this – because during work, it was too hectic.

Me working at the bakery.

   

We didn’t have a cash register, so we had to look at the price on the items, add them up on a calculator, and run the credit card machine. When customers were suspicious of the total price, we would say the prices of each item out loud and press the calculator’s buttons slowly. The management said that we don’t have a cash register so that we could serve more customers - even though while I was working there, there was a commotion when the calculated total and the items’ prices didn’t match. This made me angry. It’s the business owner who benefits from us serving more customers, but it’s the alba worker at the counter who suffers most when the price total is wrong. From an alba worker’s perspective, when we do things right, we break even, but when we do things wrong, there’s a commotion and we have to apologize repeatedly to the customer.

The reasons that alba workers would make mistakes is because we didn’t have a cash register and when you use a calculator, there’s a high chance you’ll hit the wrong button. It’s right that people become more comfortable as the world progresses and technology develops. If you want to make the payment process faster to serve a lot of customers, put more workers at the counter, don’t just make things harder for the workers. Why can’t we work more comfortably, when technology that would let us do so exists?

Of course, there were times, even during busy periods, when there weren’t many customers. At those times, I wanted to sit down. But unless there was something special going on, there were no chairs for workers, except for the one for the wife of the chain’s owner, who came to the bakery every day to oversee us. (The owner’s wife may have been involved in expanding the business or making contracts with other companies. But even though she had a clear role in the business as far as overseeing the nearby branches, we still called her samonim [a respectful term of address usually used to mean “boss’s wife”] as if she didn’t.)

I complained to my coworkers about the lack of chairs behind the counter. They said that the samonim had had them removed, saying that “if there are chairs, you’ll all sit down and chat”. Because there were no chairs at the counter, as the samonim wished, she could see me easily when there were no customers. When there were so few customers that it wasn’t necessary to have two people at the counter, I had to keep arranging boxes, putting baked goods in boxes, checking whether we were running out of plastic bags at the counter and going to get some from the basement. They tried to give us as little time to rest as possible.

When we didn’t have anything to do, I liked it when they didn’t tell us to do some other task even when the other counter worker and I would lean on the cupboards behind the counter. Getting just a little bit of rest made me happy. Why did the standard for rest get so low? There’s no way to know.

When alba and your period overlap

There was a worse problem than not having a cash register or chairs. It was menstruation. There were times when my period would be short or, if I was lucky, it would begin and end during weekdays. It was terrible when the first days fell on a weekend. I found out that the menstrual leave system applied to this workplace, and that you could use it no matter how short your hours were, but so what? Signing a labor contract hadn’t resulted in better treatment, and if I brought up menstrual leave, it could get worse. I kept my mouth shut.

I kept working even when I had my period. If the counter was busy with crowds of customers, time would fly as I concentrated on ringing them up. But even then, as the time to change my pad came, I would keep looking at my wristwatch. When the time came, I would ask my coworker at the counter next to me for her understanding, go to the bathroom in the basement, and change it. That was the only time when I could relax, if just for a short time. I would walk slowly back upstairs, and not even hurry to the counter. But then I would see a growing line of customers at my empty counter and feel less comfortable the next time I had to change my pad. After I finished working and went outside, I felt a little dizzy and things seemed hazy, maybe because of the hot natural light that I hadn’t seen for a few hours.

The bag I usually carry. I worry that the badges I have on it(10,000 won minimum wage, ‘anti-THAAD’, ‘legalize abortion’)will be used against me in interviews, so I take them off beforehand.

  

Since it was summer, I wanted wear pretty clothes to cheer myself up when the weather was nice. I would put on something I liked and go out, and when I got to work, I would put on the shirt, apron, and hat that made up our uniform. You couldn’t see anything when I was at the counter, but when I went out to organize trays or put boxes of goods out, people could see the length of my shorts. A middle-aged full-time coworker said to me, “Why do you wear such short shorts?” or, “If you go around like that, you might have a problem”. Sexual violence has nothing to do with my outfit, but I still got those comments often. Well, I guess that’s what you’re going to hear if you’re working with older people.

But the middle-aged coworker also compared me to the female alba worker at the next counter, and asked, “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” and, “Why do you wear so little makeup?” I was afraid that if I said what I wanted to, the atmosphere would sour, so I just smiled instead. But I’ll say it now: “Ah, you don’t say anything to the male alba worker over there about his appearance, you just do it to me? I do my makeup as I like and I’m not interested in dating, so whyyyy are you nitpicking?”

In a job market where it’s hard to find even alba, I’m still looking

Last winter I quit the alba job at the bakery counter because our hourly pay didn’t rise even though the minimum wage rose from 6,030 won an hour to 6,470. I thought that in that case, it would be better to get an alba job closer to where I lived and save money on transportation. When I first quit the bakery, I wasn’t doing any alba in an effort to take a rest, but then I looked around and realized I really needed the money. My phone screen was cracked so the touchscreen function didn’t work well, and it would cut off in the middle of calls, and my laptop, after having some power problems occasionally, now wouldn’t turn on at all sometimes.

When I looked into ways to fix it, I found that in my area there was only a service center that mostly did simple counselling and sent items away to be fixed. Since I had received so many discounts when I bought the phone, I wasn’t eligible for free repairs. It would be cheaper to buy another one than to fix it. Also, my laptop was so heavy that it was uncomfortable to carry around, so I needed a new one of those, too. But money was disappearing into other things like dental treatment and next semester’s tuition, and I couldn’t stand to ask my mom for money.

The phone that would cost more to fix than it would cost to buy a new one.

  

I decided to do alba. I first looked around my neighborhood. I called a convenience store. But unlike the ad they had posted on a third-party site, they told me the hourly pay was 4,000 won. I looked into other places. I was turned down for an alba job at a hakwon because I hadn’t had an alba job at a hakwon before. Where was a person like me, without much of a career history, to begin building one?

I applied to work at a café. Some of that café’s dishes included meat. As a pescatarian, I didn’t want to cook meat, but the café was a 10-minute walk from my home and paid 6,500 won per hour. I had an interview. Even though I had been told it would be an individual interview, there was a second interviewee sitting beside me. After the interview, I waited for a call, but it turned out I hadn’t passed.

At that point, I regretted quitting the bakery alba job. They had paid more than the minimum wage, and had given me long enough hours that I could earn enough money while also leaving my evenings free. There were almost no items there with meat in them, and even if there were, I only had to package them and ring them up. Ah, it turns out that it’s not easy to find a good alba job, and even if you find one, it’s not easy to get it.

Lamenting this, I looked for another job, eventually seeing an ad for a teaching assistant position at a math hakwon an hour and a half away from my house. I applied immediately, and luckily, I was hired. It offered very short hours (3 times a week for 4 hours a day) and no highly-paid weekend or holiday hours, but I felt fortunate just to have it. 

When I finish work at the hakwon and arrive back at the bus stop near my house, it is 11:30 at night. There is quite a distance between the hakwon and its nearest bus stop, and I have to wait 20 or 30 minutes for the bus. If there are no people, the cars whoosh by on the road, and I feel scared that there is no one around. I put in my earphones and listen to music, but then, fearful that I won’t be able to hear a strange person approaching because of the music, I still can’t relax.

My mom has been walking me home from the bus stop near our house, but she won’t always be able to do that. She’s also a part-timer, and sometimes she has to work nights. She will be too tired for it. In that kind of situation, I think of the time I had been drinking and took a taxi home. I got out about five minutes from my house to save a little money, but as I was walking, I saw that a man was following me, so I ran into the elevator of a nearby building and called a friend, with my heart pounding. I worry that this kind of thing will happen again, but I really need money.

When I have enough money, I’ll quit. I calculated how long that would take, and found that it would be a while before I could even replace my phone and notebook. Since the semester is almost over, I’m looking for another alba job that I can do at night and also on weekdays during the day or weekends. I thinki about how if the minimum wage becomes 10,000 won, I won’t have to desperately work two jobs, and then, because I have to hurry up and make money, I continue looking through the job ads on the alba employment site.

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/sub_read.html?uid=7912&section=sc2