Way Cleared For 90-Day Paid Leave For Mothers

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Way Cleared For 90-Day Paid Leave For Mothers

The National Assembly opened a plenary session on Wednesday, revising three laws to give women 90 days of maternity leave starting November 1.

Legislators agreed to the revision of the Labor Standards Act, Sexual Equality Employment Act and the Employment Insurance Act to put through the Maternity Protection Act.

The 90 days of paid leave can be used before and after giving birth. However, not all working women can benefit. The law specifies that the existing 60 days of leave will be covered by the employer, and the additional 30 days by employment insurance and from government coffers.

Government figures show that of the 5,307,000 women in the work force, only 2,114,000 or 39.8 percent are insured through the state-run Employment Insurance. Thus only they can be beneficiaries of the new law.

Legislators passed 12 other bills, including a revision of the Pharmaceutical Law to bar pharmacists from giving medical injections. The shots will be available only through doctors. The law goes into effect in November.

Until then patients will still have to trek back and forth from a clinic to get the prescription to a pharmacy to get the needle and medicine and back to the hospital to receive the shot.

The Korean Pharmacists Association immediately protested the new law.

"Excluding pharmacists from providing injection shots ignores and violates the agreement reached last November by the doctors, the pharmacists and the government," the druggists' interest group said in a statement.

Legislators continued partisan sparring over a prosecutors' investigation into alleged tax evasion by six newspaper companies, the proposed trip of the North Korean defector, Hwang Jang-yop, to the United States and other matters.

They were united, however, in adopting a resolution asking that Japan revise history textbooks that have soured relations between the two countries.



by Kim Jung-ha

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