법무법인(유한) 율촌 | Yulchon LLC

Yulchon achieved a victory at the Supreme Court on behalf of our client Kangwon Land in a case in which Kangwon Land's fixed-term casino dealers claimed unreasonable discrimination in comparison to its regular dealers.

Kangwon Land's fixed-term dealers filed an application for remedy with the Regional Labor Relations Commission, claiming unreasonable discrimination on wages in comparison to regular dealers. Our client initially lost at both the Regional Labor Relations Commission and then on appeal before the Central Labor Relations Commission. Kangwon Land retained Yulchon as counsel in appealing the latter loss at the administrative court. Yulchon successfully persuaded the administrative court through the Supreme Court that the difference in most of the wages was reasonable, and therefore did not constitute discrimination.

The case demonstrates Yulchon's ability to pinpoint key facts and come up with strong arguments that persuade a court to rule in our client's favor. Here, the Supreme Court found that, among others, the proper category of employees with whom the fixed-term dealers must compare themselves were those regular dealers who had already entered into an employment contract without a fixed term, and not the non-existent (i.e., imaginary) employees that the fixed-term dealers had compared themselves with (to support their discrimination argument) in their brief. Second, if the wages of the employees who are compared are made up of different categories (e.g., here, only regular dealers receiving special year-end bonuses), such categories cannot be compared directly to determine the question of whether there is unreasonable discrimination. Instead, the categories of wages that correspond to the base salary must be compared to the base salary, and the categories that do not must be subjected to a separate comparison.