“How High Is My Wage?”

The Dong-A Ilbo reported an article regarding a website that revealed the average annual wages of 450,000 workers by industry and position of their jobs from a survey of 6,058 businesses with more than five workers. After the existence of this site was made known, hundreds of thousands of people visited the website, causing an overload on the site’s computer server.

In particular, career workers displayed tremendous interest. They persistently attempted to connect to the website in order to check how their annual wages stacked up against other jobs in similar industries and job positions. They even bombarded the Korea Labor Institute with requests to restore the server. Businesses showed willingness to take this information into consideration. The government was also surprised by this enthusiastic reaction, and they revealed detailed plans for the future.

“How much an employee from a competing enterprise receives”-

On major Internet portals, ‘Wage Information System’ was the number one keyword on search engines, and thousands of comments were listed. However, after the server broke down, workers attempting to access the site were distressed because they were unable to use the search program to compare their own wages. An Internet user with the ID name ‘hellome’ wrote, “Even if it is a trial run, there should have been at least a certain amount of server capacity provided. I’ve tried to access the site a hundred times since this morning but the webpage is not available, which is very frustrating.” Other Internet users wrote down their own annual wages, and compared them to the average wage reported in the article, launching heated arguments with divided opinions.

Hyeon Seon-yeong, a section chief at Hyundai Motors, said, “After reading the article in Dong-A Ilbo, I tried to visit the website at 7:30 a.m. right after I arrived at work, but I was disappointed because it wasn’t accessible.” She added, “The wage standards of other competing businesses or industries are the greatest issues of interest for workers.”

Trial Service Lacked Sufficient Server Capacity-

The Wage Information System website shut down for a lack of server capacity due to the fact that the system is currently running a trial operation. The Korea Labor Institute said, “There was not sufficient server capacity because we were only providing a trial service, but as hundreds of thousands of people visited the site all at once, not only the Wage Information System website but also the Korea Labor Institute website crashed.”

Moreover, most of the labor institute workers were attending a reform workshop seminar held at Mt. Geumgang on May 17 and 18, meaning that the website will likely be restored only by as early as next week. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor held a press conference officially announcing that after running a test operation this year and collecting more data, the system will go into full-scale operation starting next year.

Labor Ministry official Kim In-gon said, “We didn’t know that the people’s interest would be this tremendous.” He added, “Having learned from this experience, we will work to increase server capacity as well as provide more accurate and key wage information.”