Although it has been more than three years since the 'Workplace Harassment Prohibition Act' was enforced, a survey result showed that 3 out of 4 office workers still do not report and 'endure' when they are being bullied at work.
According to the civic group Gapjil 119 at Work, as a result of a survey of 1,000 office workers on the 2nd-8th of last month, 29.1% of the respondents said they had experienced workplace bullying in the past year.
This is a decrease of 15.4 percentage points from 44.5% in September 2019, right after the Workplace Harassment Prevention Act was enforced.
Among those who experienced workplace bullying, 38.2% said the level of bullying was severe.
However, coping with workplace bullying was rather passive than before the enforcement of the law, and 73.5% of employees who experienced bullying answered that they 'be patient or pretend they don't know'.
It increased by 13.8 percentage points from 59.7% at the time of the survey in September 2019.
15.8% of the respondents said they had quit the company altogether, and 23.4% of them complained at the individual level or with colleagues.
Only 7.6% responded that they reported to the company or related organizations.
The reasons for not reporting were 'the situation is unlikely to improve' at 74.5% and 'because it is likely to be disadvantaged in personnel management in the future' 12.8%.
In fact, it was confirmed that 66.7% of the complainants were not recognized as workplace harassment.
23.3% of the respondents also said that they were treated unfavorably because of reporting.
68.7% of the respondents said they were aware of the current workplace harassment laws.
The percentage of employees who were aware of this law was 40.0% for non-regular workers and 43.6% for businesses with fewer than 5 employees, which was only half of 79.8% for regular employees and 82.1% for businesses with 300 or more employees.
After the law came into force, 47.8% of the respondents said that they had received relevant training at work.