Human Rights Commission: "Parental Leave Workers Should Not Be Disadvantaged in Performance Evaluations"

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[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Dong-hoon] The National Human Rights Commission has recommended measures to ensure that employees on parental leave are not disadvantaged in teacher performance evaluations.

On the 2nd, the Human Rights Commission conducted an ex officio investigation targeting 10,027 national and public schools under 17 metropolitan and provincial offices of education nationwide. The investigation found that 933 schools reported including point deductions for teachers on parental leave in their quantitative performance evaluations. This accounts for 9.3% of all schools surveyed.

Among the 933 schools, 930 treated the parental leave period as non-working time and applied differential scoring based on actual working periods or assigned the lowest grade or score. In 3 schools, the point deductions for teachers on parental leave were specifically detailed in the quantitative evaluation criteria.

The Human Rights Commission stated, "Performance evaluations should assess achievements during the period worked, and it is inappropriate to uniformly apply point deductions for periods not worked." It explained that disadvantageous treatment of employees on parental leave constitutes "discriminatory acts infringing on the right to equality" as defined by the National Human Rights Commission Act.

Accordingly, the Commission recommended the Minister of Education include provisions in the "Guidelines for Payment of Performance Bonuses to Educational Officials" to prevent disadvantageous treatment in teacher performance evaluations related to performance bonuses. It also advised the 17 metropolitan and provincial superintendents of education to explicitly prohibit point deductions for parental leave or inclusion of parental leave periods as non-working time subject to deductions when establishing multi-faceted evaluation criteria for performance assessments at each school.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.