The Unfair Dismissal Standard

You were called in, told it isn’t working out, and asked not to come back — maybe with a month’s pay offered as a goodbye, maybe with a resignation letter already printed for you to sign. If your instinct says an employer can simply do that, recalibrate: that instinct comes from at-will systems, and Korea is not one of them.

Budang haego (부당해고) — unfair dismissal — is any dismissal without justifiable cause or without the required procedure. The rules sit in the Labor Standards Act (근로기준법), and they apply to foreign employees the same as to Koreans — the Act has no nationality requirement, and foreign workers use its remedy system routinely.

What matters most is speed and paper: the remedy deadline is three months, and the case is decided on documents. This guide covers what makes a dismissal unlawful, the two notice rules people confuse, whether what happened to you legally counts as a dismissal at all, and how the remedy actually runs.

1. The standard: justifiable cause

An employer may not dismiss, lay off, suspend, transfer, cut the wages of, or otherwise punish an employee without justifiable cause (jeongdanghan iyu) (정당한 이유) — Labor Standards Act art. 23(1). Note the breadth: the same rule covers demotions, forced unpaid leave, and punitive transfers, not just firings. The Commission remedy in section 4 covers all of them.

The statute does not define justifiable cause, but in practice the bar is high: conduct or circumstances serious enough that the employment relationship cannot reasonably continue — proven misconduct, sustained and documented underperformance after real chances to improve, genuine loss of the qualification the job requires. One bad review, a personality clash with a manager, or “the vibe changed” is not a justifiable cause. And in the remedy proceeding, the employer carries the burden of proving the cause — you do not have to prove the negative.

Business-reason dismissals are their own regime: a layoff for managerial necessity has four statutory requirements — urgent business necessity, real efforts to avoid the dismissal, rational and fair selection criteria, and prior consultation with worker representatives (art. 24). “Restructuring” said out loud does not satisfy any of them; an employer claiming business necessity has signed up to prove all four.

2. The two notice rules (people confuse them)

Korean law imposes two separate notice duties on a dismissing employer, and mixing them up is the single most common confusion in these cases.

The traffic runs both ways. Paying you a month’s wages does not make an unjust dismissal lawful — notice pay buys time, not legitimacy. And a verbal firing, a text message that just says “don’t come in anymore,” or a notice that names no grounds fails art. 27 regardless of what you were paid. The advance-notice rule has narrow exceptions — under 3 months of service, a disaster that makes the business impossible, or intentional, serious damage by the employee as defined in ministry rules — but the written-notice rule for the dismissal itself has none.

Keep the writing you were given; it fixes both the grounds the employer is committed to and the date every deadline runs from. An employer who names no grounds in writing cannot invent better ones later without explaining why they never appeared in the notice.

3. Was it legally a dismissal at all?

The protections above attach to a dismissal — a termination the employer imposed. Employers know this, which is why so much effort goes into making a dismissal look like something else.

“Recommended resignation.” Gwongo sajik (권고사직)is the practice of pressuring you to resign “voluntarily,” often with a printed resignation letter and a small payment attached. If you sign, the paper says you quit — and a person who quit was not dismissed. Genuine coercion can be challenged, but those cases are hard and evidence-heavy. The cheap protection is simply not signing in the room.

Fixed-term contracts. When a fixed-term contract genuinely expires and is not renewed, that is normally an expiry, not a dismissal. Two important limits: being cut loose before the term ends is a dismissal and needs cause like any other; and under the Fixed-term Workers Act (기간제법), art. 4, an employee kept on fixed-term contracts beyond 2 yearsis treated as having an open-ended contract — after which “the contract ended” stops working as an exit. Where renewals were repeated and routine, non-renewal can also become contestable on its facts.

Probation.A probationary period widens the employer’s room to judge suitability — it does not switch the job to at-will. Ending a probationer still requires a reasonable ground, communicated properly; treat a probation-period firing as a case worth assessing, not an automatic loss.

4. The remedy: the Labor Relations Commission

Unfair-dismissal cases do not start in court. They start at the Labor Relations Commission (노동위원회) — an administrative tribunal that hears the case, orders remedies, and moves far faster than litigation. You apply to the regional commission covering the workplace (for Pyeongtaek, the Gyeonggi commission), online or on paper, within 3 months of the dismissal (art. 28). There is no filing fee, and workers file without representatives every day — though whether that is wise in your case is a separate question.

1. 1

   File the remedy application

   Within 3 months of the dismissal taking effect, to the regional Labor Relations Commission. The application itself is short; the case is built afterward through written submissions.
2. 2

   Investigation and written exchange

   Both sides submit position papers and evidence. The employer must justify the cause and the procedure; your job is the timeline and the paper trail.
3. 3

   The hearing (심문회의)

   A panel questions both sides in person, usually within about 60 days of filing. Settlement (화해) is actively encouraged at every stage — a settled case ends with an agreement that has enforceable weight.
4. 4

   Ruling — then short appeal windows

   The commission orders a remedy or rejects the application. Either side can seek review by the National Labor Relations Commission within 10 days of receiving the ruling, then administrative litigation within 15 days of the review decision.

Proceedings run in Korean — submissions, hearing, ruling — so an English-speaking representative or a trusted interpreter is a practical necessity rather than a luxury. If your average monthly wage is under ₩3 million, you can apply to have a publicly funded representative (a lawyer or certified labor attorney) appointed free of charge for the commission case. Note that this is a different track from the labor office wage complaint — if your problem is money you already earned rather than the firing itself, start with Unpaid Wages: Labor Office vs. Lawsuit.

5. What you can win

The default remedy is reinstatement plus back pay: you return to your original job, and the employer pays the wages you would have earned during the dismissal period. For many foreign employees, though, walking back into that office is the last thing they want — and the law accounts for it. If you do not want reinstatement, the commission can instead order the employer to pay you at least the wages for the dismissal period, with the possibility of more on top (art. 30(3)). Ask for the monetary order early — the request must be in before you are notified of the hearing date.

Remedy orders have teeth. An employer who ignores one faces an enforcement levy (이행강제금) of up to ₩30 million, imposable repeatedly until the order is obeyed (art. 33). Between the levy, the back-pay meter, and the settlement pressure the process itself creates, most cases that survive the hearing stage end in payment rather than defiance.

6. The under-5-employees exception

Here is the exception that decides many cases before they start: workplaces that ordinarily employ fewer than 5 employees are outside much of the Labor Standards Act (art. 11 and its enforcement decree) — including the just-cause rule, the written-notice rule, and the Commission remedy. At a 4-person hagwon or a small restaurant, a dismissal without cause is, as a rule, not challengeable at the Labor Relations Commission.

What survives at any size: 30 days’ notice or notice pay (art. 26 applies regardless of headcount), statutory severance after a year, and all unpaid-wage protections. A contract-based civil claim for a termination that breached your written contract can also remain open — a narrower and slower road, worth a professional look rather than an assumption either way.

The headcount itself is a common battleground: it is an average of workers ordinarily employed — part-timers included — not whoever happened to be in the room, and payroll records rather than the owner’s say-so decide it. If the number hovers near five, do not concede the point without the records.

7. Common mistakes

• Negotiating past the deadline.The 3 months run while your employer says “let’s work something out.” File first — the case can settle just as easily after filing, and the deadline stops mattering.
• Signing the resignation letter — or any paper handed across the desk in the dismissal meeting — before it has been read by someone on your side.
• Treating notice pay as the whole remedy.A month’s wages settles art. 26 and nothing else; whether the dismissal itself was lawful is a separate and usually bigger question.
• Leaving without the records. The dismissal notice, your contract, payslips, the messages around the firing — collect them while your accounts and badge still work. The case is built from exactly these.
• Ignoring the visa clock. If your stay in Korea is tied to your employment, a dismissal can affect your status, and the timing of your response should take that into account from day one — get both the labor position and the immigration position checked early, together.

The commission decides on paper: the written notice, the contract, payslips, and the messages around the firing. Gather them before your accounts are cut off.

Start by fixing one fact: the exact date the dismissal took effect, in writing. Every clock above runs from it.

Frequently asked questions

Written by Attorney Chulho Choi (SOL & LUNA / Law Firm Myeong, KBA-registered specialist in Civil and Criminal Law). Reviewed as of August 2026. Updated when laws change.