South Korean tech giant Naver investigated over death of new mum bullied at work

Naver, South Korea’s largest internet portal, has come under investigation as another employee committed suicide last September after complaining of workplace bullying, according to the labour ministry.

The Ministry of Employment and Labour on Thursday said it started an investigation recently into the death of a 37-year-old female programmer, who had worked for Naver for more than a decade, as her bereaved family filed a complaint last month alleging that the company violated the Labour Standards Act.

The bereaved family claimed that the deceased worker was forced to transfer to a team, which wasn’t related to her speciality, when she returned in February, 2016 from a year-long maternity leave period. Despite her continuous request to stop the unfair treatment toward working mums, Naver refused to take any measure, according to the bereaved family.

In addition, the company reportedly did not allow her to work flexibly, despite the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which orders an employer to allow flexible working hours for employees who have children aged eight years old or younger.

As a result, she took more maternity leave in January 2022 and committed suicide in September of that year.

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“Workplace bullying is basically discourteous to a human being, so we will eradicate such practices through strict supervision,” Labour Minister Lee Jung-sik told reporters during a press conference on Thursday. “We will take stern measures if we discover any illegality in this case.”

Naver denied the allegation, saying it could not find any proof during its internal investigation.

“We will cooperate with the labour ministry’s investigation,” the company said.

This is not the first time Naver has been confronted with a labour ministry investigation over a worker’s suicide.

In 2021, a Naver programmer in his 40s was found dead near his apartment located close to the company’s headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi province, with a note presumed to have been written by him. The note indicated extreme stress from workplace bullying with the names of several people on it.

When the labour ministry conducted a special inspection of Naver and its employees after the incident, more than half of 1,982 respondents answered that they had suffered workplace bullying at least once over the past six months.

In addition, MSCI, an American finance company, said at that time a workplace bullying incident at Naver resulted in a scoring deduction in its ESG rating, measuring the company’s resilience to risks related to environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors.

“Depending on further development, it may incur a further deduction in scoring, which may result in a rating change in the future,” the US financial firm said at that time.

Although MSCI has maintained Naver’s corporate rating at AAA since its latest upgrade in May 2021, it gave an orange grade toward the South Korean firm’s labour-management relations. Orange, which is a notch above the lowest red grade, indicates that a company has been involved in one or more recent severe structural controversies that are ongoing, according to MSCI.