November 25, 2025
SEOUL – School cooks and other nonregular school staff began a nationwide walkout last week, calling for improved wages, pay during school breaks and better welfare.
But the workers say these demands, while important, only skim the surface of what pushed thousands to walk out of Korea’s schools.
The school staff strike has been sparked by a deeper crisis, they say — one shaped by toxic working environments that treat the workers responsible for feeding Korea’s children as second-class citizens.
The workers say they have suffered years of breathing carcinogenic fumes, fainting in overheated kitchens, returning to work with lingering injuries and watching coworkers fall ill, sometimes fatally.
They cite the case of a Seoul school cafeteria worker in her 50s, who learned she had lung cancer in 2023 after a CT scan. Doctors suggested it was caused by cooking fumes generated during frying and high-heat food preparation. The World Health Organization classifies these cooking emissions as a probably carcinogenic.
She said that whenever smoke filled the kitchen, she felt as if “the fumes were killing my lungs again.”
After a year of surgery and treatment, she returned to the same workplace, where conditions were the same despite her cancer having been recognized as a workplace-related illness.
She is one of 178 school meal workers nationwide to have received industrial-accident approval for lung cancer as of August, 74 of whom have been medically confirmed to have lung cancer in the last three years. Fifteen have died.
Despite these illnesses, kitchen upgrades lag. Across the nation, only 41 percent of school kitchens have had ventilation improvements. The figure for Seoul stands at just 12 percent, with regions like Gyeonggi Province and Incheon also far behind the government’s target of completing upgrades by 2027, according to an analysis of nationwide data by the office of Rep. Kang Kyung-sook of the Rebuilding Korea Party.
“Workers say they continue to cook in stifling heat trapped inside aging buildings with outdated or malfunctioning ventilation,” said Woo Si-bon, head director of the national education staff department under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.
“Summers bring conditions that many call unbearable. Kitchen temperatures routinely exceed 33 degrees Celsius, and workers dressed in long sleeves and rubber boots report feeling temperatures above 45 degrees.”
Industrial-accident cases in school cafeterias rose 17.5 percent last year to more than 2,100 incidents, involving burns, musculoskeletal injuries and other workplace hazards.
About 3.7 percent of school kitchens had an industrial accident in 2023, more than five times the overall industrial average of 0.67 percent.
Workers say the nature of the job itself fuels these dangers: preparing hundreds of meals within a fixed time window creates what they describe as “high-intensity, short-burst labor,” followed by hours of dishwashing and cleanup in cramped spaces where heavy lifting is unavoidable.
School cafeteria workers, on average, serve meals to 130 to 180 students each, which is more than twice the workload of comparable public institutions.
Chronic understaffing deepens the toll, and worker retention is worsening: Data shows that the average length of service for school cooking workers has fallen from 8.44 years in 2023 to 7.8 years this year.
Unequal pay structure
In addition, workers say their pay structure magnifies the sense of inequity.
Although they work in public schools, they are not classified as public servants and remain outside systems that govern teacher and staff benefits. Their base salaries and holiday bonuses are lower, and they are paid even less during school breaks — leaving many without income for months each year.
The union is demanding that, starting next year they receive the same treatment as national public employees, whose holiday bonuses have already been budgeted to rise to 120 percent of their monthly base salary.
But the government’s proposal falls far short of this.
Instead of restructuring bonuses around a full month’s salary, officials offered a flat 50,000 won ($34) annual increase — 25,000 won per major holiday — an amount the union says is too small to compare to a system tied to 120 percent of base pay.
Cafeteria workers currently earn a monthly base salary of under 2.07 million won, which falls below the monthly minimum wage for a 40-hour week.
The union is also seeking an increase of 90,880 won to close that gap, while the government insists it can raise monthly wages by only 72,000 won, in line with the projected 3.5 percent pay increase for public employees.
The union additionally points to the three months of school vacation, during which cafeteria workers have their hours slashed, typically earning as little as 730,000 won per month for their cleaning services.
Failing to narrow the gap after hours of negotiations, education authorities say the union’s demands far exceeded what current budgets could accommodate.
However, union leaders have accused the government of refusing earnest engagement, saying negotiators repeated the phrases “not acceptable” and “under review” throughout the talks. “Their avoidance has pushed us into this strike,” the School Irregular Workers’ Solidarity Council said.
The strike is unfolding in phases across the country through early December. Schools have turned to simplified meals and adjusted schedules, but workers say temporary measures will not solve structural problems that have been ignored for years.
They are urging lawmakers to approve a pending bill that would, for the first time, formally define school meal workers in statute and require the government to draft comprehensive health and safety plans every three years.
Progressive Party Rep. Jeong Hye-kyung and the School Irregular Workers’ Union have launched a petition campaign in support of amending the School Meals Act.
Jeong’s bill centers on guaranteeing the safety and health of cafeteria staff, noting that the system cannot operate “if the lives and safety of the workers who run it are not protected.”
The proposal would establish staffing standards for cafeteria workers through presidential decree and ensure that parents and worker representatives have a seat on school meal committees run by local education offices.
Democratic Party of Korea Rep. Ko Min-jung has also introduced a separate amendment. Lawmakers in the broader progressive bloc say they aim to advance both bills through the parliamentary Education Committee and seek passage in a plenary vote before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, another round of negotiations between the government and the union is set to happen on Nov. 27.
The two sides have met 10 times since their first full bargaining session on Aug. 2.
Union officials say they hope the upcoming meeting can open a path to resolving what they describe as a long-standing structural crisis.
On the first two days of the strike, over 11,400 workers participated, disrupting school meal service at over 1,900 schools Seoul, Incheon, Gangwon Province, North Chungcheong Province, and the Jeolla and Jeju regions.