코리아헤럴드 번역

코리아헤럴드 기사입니다. 정확한 번역 부탁드려요. (코리아헤럴드 프리미엄회원이신분들께서 보신다면 해석판복사해주심감사..)   기사1) Shortsighted Action The decision to grant full-time status to 54,000 nonregular workers in the public sector and raise the pay for other nonregular employees is not only shortsighted but also flawed. It is also suspected of being motivated by partisan political gains. It is a global trend to make it easier for corporations to hire and fire. But the decision made by the administration and its party on Tuesday runs counter to the worldwide move to promote flexibility in employment and promote productivity. The change of status and the planned pay increases for temporary and other nonregular workers in the public sector will encourage their counterparts in the private sector to be more vocal in their demand for full-time status and greater compensation. This will in turn force corporations to cut back on their plans to hire nonregular workers. Simply put, greater job security and fatter paychecks in the public sector will result in reducing job openings in the private sector. The administration's action will also make labor more combative in its fight against management. Besides, it is not right for the administration to take such action before the National Assembly acts on a bill on the status of nonregular workers, on which it has been deliberating for the past two years. Another problem with the change of status for public-sector workers is an addition cost of 275 billion won each year. The administration is planning to spend that amount of taxpayers' money without making any attempt to save expenditure elsewhere. The Roh administration, which has already put an additional 23,000 people on its payroll, is rightly accused of pursuing big government. The administration and its party will certainly benefit from the change of status for nonregular workers. It may not be a mere coincidence that it will be completed by the end of next year, when the next presidential election is scheduled to be held. 기사2) Insurance management   The government is working on a proposal to put four separate national insurance programs - pension, health, employment and industrial accident compensation - under the control of one integrated corporation. The rationale is to remove much of the waste resulting from overlapping work among the different corporations. In addition, it is suggested that the corporation be placed under the wing of the National Tax Service so that it will avail itself of taxpayer information. That will surely reduce the cost of collecting data on the assets and incomes of the insured. Their proposed reform, though long overdue, should be welcomed. All the more so, given that their bloated management is claimed to be one of the worst cases of "high cost and low efficiency" in the public sector. Under the current management system, the corporations assess contributions to be paid by the insured and their employers, collect them and pay out benefits separately. Their integration will help save a lot of money, though the government has yet to come up with estimated cost reductions. If no action is taken now, it will be near impossible to control the runaway cost of management. For instance, National Health Insurance Corp., which has more than 10,000 people on its payroll now, reportedly has been demanding that it be allowed to hire 2,000 more by July 2008. The additional manpower, the corporation says, will be needed when a new insurance scheme starts to cover nursing care for senior citizens afflicted with dementia, paralysis or other ailments. The government is held responsible for the existing redundancy in work. It created a separate corporation each time it introduced a social insurance, instead of creating one corporation and authorizing it to take over the management of each of the insurance programs as they came into being over a long period of time - stretching from 1964 to 1995. As the costs of running the separate corporations were snowballing, the government attempted to integrate them into one in 1998. But it had to curb its ambitious, yet ill-prepared, project in the face of strong opposition from the corporations` unionized employees. The government will have to take extra care this time if it is to avoid a similar mistake. The reason is that employee resistance will be no less fierce. The separate unions are already seeking to form an alliance against the proposed reform in management. It is not difficult to understand why the employees are so angry about the integration plan. The workers, many of them attracted to the public corporations as they offered greater job security than private companies, are now worried about being laid off. Many of them may lose their jobs in the process of phased integration. True, the government promises to rehire them after training them for new jobs. It says it will have to create so many jobs if it is to meet growing demands for social security services. No matter what it says, it will be realistically impossible for the government to provide all of them with new jobs. The workers will have to understand that a more realistic approach will be for them try to take as many concessions as possible from the government and minimize the number of layoffs. At the same time, they will have to realize that providing them with job security is not the primary concern of the government. The insurance programs were created to benefit the insured. As such, it is an obligation, not a choice, for the government to reform them and thus cut their costs.