Editor’s note: In collaboration with a women workers’ writing group, Ilda is publishing a series examining the previously ignored work and lives of female laborers. This series is being produced with support from the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.

 

Fighting the weather and dealing with difficult customers

 

The reason that Kim Yeong-seon (not her real name) became a paid designated driver [a person whom you can call to come and drive you home in your car when you are drunk] two years ago was that she had no time to see her husband as things were. She worked twelve-hour shifts, sometimes at night, and her husband was driving a truck back and forth from Jeju Island, so his time off was not regular.  She looked into part-time work, but there was nothing that paid sufficiently. Then, a friend who was working as a designated driver recommended it to her, saying that the schedule was flexible and it paid better than jobs where you sat in one place; she began doing it on the side, and then it became her main job.

 

These days she takes calls from 8 p.m. to around 11 p.m. as a corporate driver, and then until 1 a.m. as a metropolitan driver. A corporate driver is someone whose employer has made a contract with a company to drive their higher level (team leader and up) employees. A metropolitan driver is the regular kind of designated driver you see around—one who takes calls from anyone.

 

“Corporate drivers have to wear a suit and formal shoes. That’s uncomfortable, but the pay is a little better. But after 11, corporate calls pretty much stop. So then I take metropolitan calls. Until almost 1. These days, there aren’t hardly any calls after 1. It’s because drinking culture has changed so that people only go to one location, and don’t pressure each other to drink. After that, the problem is getting back home. Sometimes it can take up to two hours, or if I’m lucky enough to get a call from far away going in the direction of my house, I can finish early.”

 

When she started working, the flipped work schedule made it hard for her to sleep, and the lack of regular sunlight made it dizzying for her when she did come out during the day. Working outside all year round makes the cold, heat, and mosquitoes a problem. Her hands freeze during winter even when she wears gloves, and the wind knifes through her no matter how many layers she puts on. When it snows, driving becomes dangerous, and when it rains, she can rarely avoid getting soaked even with an umbrella. In the summer, it is so hot during the tropical nights that she becomes anxious that customers can smell the sweat pouring off her, and the ceaselessly attacking mosquitoes make repellant a necessity.

 

Right now, fine dust [caused by deforestation in China] is a big problem. On a particularly bad day, she went out without a dust mask and felt as if she were choking.  Also, because most of the customers are men, they often make sexual jokes to her or even sexually harass her.

 

“Some of them curse at us, and there have been many who ask how much I make and then say, ‘I’ll give you that much to spend time with me.’ So once I even drove one straight to the police station. The man was really drunk and had begun to assault me, so I went to the police station. Later it went even to the prosecutor’s office. At first, he claimed that he couldn’t remember what he had done because he had been so drunk, so he kept saying, ‘Go ahead and try to take me to court,” instead of apologizing. But I described the situation so exactly that in the end he admitted fault. There are a lot of female designated drivers like that, who experience that kind of sexual harassment. But after working for a while I’ve started to just act like they’re making a joke when they do that kind of thing. I’ve changed.”

 

▲ Although ride-hailing driver services are springing up rapidly, there are virtually no systems or policies governing the industry. [Source: pixabay.com]

“You don’t get customers, and they just bilk you out of fees”

 

All a designated driver needs to work is a driver’s license. You don’t even need a contract with the managing company. You simply say that you will work there, get the smartphone application that lists calls, and pay for insurance. You pay insurance and a usage fee for the app every month, but the company only offers liability insurance, so you have no choice but to drive as carefully as possible. And all the company does is connect you to customers with a few words.

 

But that’s not all. Despite not taking any responsibility for the driver, the company takes 20% of their earning through fees and excuses about this or that. These days, the biggest problem that has arisen is that of the apps of a company called Logi.

 

“There’s a company called Logi, that people complain about a lot. Normally, if you have one program you can get customers, but they’ve divided their program into “A”, “B” and “C” and they ask for 15,000 won for each. You can choose whether or not to install them. Whether to install one or two. But the problem is that A lists calls from one area, while B gets them from another. So usually designated drivers end up installing all three.”

 

To add to that, designated drivers have to pay a fee when they cancel a booking.

 

“Say I got a call. But, if I think, oh—I can’t go there, and I press ‘cancel,’ a 500-won fee is taken out. And if I’ve talked with the customer [on the phone] and decided I just can’t get there, or I cannot figure out where they are, and I cancel the call, the situation room tells me to press ‘completed.’ If I press ‘completed’ then the fee is taken out—say, for 4,000 won for a 20,000 won distance. So I don’t get the customer and they still bilk me out of the fee. To add to that, if you call the situation room to cancel a call, another 1,000 won is taken out. Right now one of the many things that designated driving companies profit off of is this call-cancellation fee. I heard that there are 50,000 designated drivers just in the capital area. So taking even just 500 won per person adds up to quite a lot.”

 

That’s not all. Because drivers are multiplying as companies are springing up everywhere and it’s very easy to get a job at one, the competition has become fierce and the prices keep going down. A new company tries to be competitive by offering low prices, but then those prices become standard. Through this, drivers’ earnings can’t but decrease, but rising demand means that company’s profits are increasing.

 

“Our earnings are getting too low. A call that used to be 10,000 won is now down to 8,000 won. From what I know, before, when you started driving there was a 15,000 won base fee for anything under 10 kilometers, but now it’s always 10,000 won, and when you got past that it was supposed to be 10,000 won per kilometer but now that’s gone too. That’s one reason why I moved to corporate driving. But the company wants to get lots of business at low prices, and attracting a lot of customers means it adds up. That’s their first priority. They don’t think about us at all.”

 

Support like training, minimum per-kilometer fee, and insurance needed

 

Yeong-seon hopes to make about 100,000 won in net earnings per day. To earn that much, she has to drive around 200 kilometers. At first, driving this much made her nauseous. Nevertheless, there were many calls and they continued until late, so she could say, “I’ll do this much and then stop.” But now that’s impossible. The rates are lower and it’s gotten harder to catch calls.

 

But she continues to do the work because she can use her time freely and the pay per hour is better than in other jobs.

 

“At first I intended to make 100,000 won, but I found I could make more if I wanted to. I joke that the pay for doing this for three or four hours is less than that for going out and washing dishes for twelve hours at a time. And so it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or woman, once you start designated driving it’s hard to quit. I even tried looking at want ads a while ago. Sometimes in life you have to pay a lot of money all at once. But (as a designated driver) you get paid every day so it’s hard to save up, and you feel a little suspicious. There are those kinds of moments. So I tried (finding another job), but then I gave up. Working twelve hours a day, only having one day off per week. But when I add it up in my head, if I make 70,000 won per day and only work 20 days, that’s 1,400,000 won. But these days the lower rates are really stressing me out. I know the prices. If it’s this distance from here, I should get this much, but I look at the app and start swearing. I curse the company and the client.”

 

It is likely that most designated drivers take the job because of the pay and flexibility. They almost make up for the company’s swindling, the customers’ verbal abuse, the fear of getting in an accident, the battles with the weather, and the late nights. It also helps that it’s a job that you can get with nothing but the ability to drive. I expect that worsening job security contribute to the influx of these men and women who have trouble finding other jobs—though this job, too, is becoming unstable and its circumstances poor.

 

“The first thing [that is needed] is training, training for beginners. And a [government-]set rate for a certain distance. It should be set—this distance is this much, or each kilometer we get this much. Until we have that, the prices will keep going down and beginners will keep taking crap calls (ones that don’t pay much compare to the distance), because they don’t know any better. Then the [experienced] workers can’t make much, either. And insurance. We pay 60,000 won per month, but there’s a lot that is not covered. And the maximum compensation you can get is too low.”

 

She adds that the qualification requirements for becoming a designated driver should be tightened, and information about clients’ needs to be shared.

 

“As it is now, even someone with an electric ankle bracelet could be a designated driver if they had a car and driver’s license, which is really wrong. I mean, even people with a drunk driving record can do it. Customers don’t know anything about us. And we don’t know anything about the customers. If a customer has been obnoxious before, the company should put them on a blacklist, so they can’t call a designated driver again. But they don’t do that now. There are many ways of being obnoxious, you know. Not paying, reporting drivers for sexual harassment even though we didn’t touch them, and so on. The company should keep track of that and not take their calls. They have to do that in order for customers to keep the rules to some extent, and for us to provide good service. It’s because they, the management, do whatever the customer wants that it’s hard for designated drivers.”

 

Currently, after public transportation stops running at night, designated drivers use a shuttle to get around. The shuttle is a van that follows a set course and is driven by a private individual. Riding in it can be quite dangerous.

 

“I wish that the N (night) bus ran more often. Riding the shuttle makes me really uncomfortable. I wonder when it will break down, and the driver zig-zags around and drives too fast. These shuttles are illegal. If there’s an accident and I die, there’s no compensation. That’s the biggest problem. But that’s all there is right now, so if it was gotten rid of, work would get too hard. We have no choice.”

 

A designated driver is a person who gets customers home safely

 

▲ A rest area for drivers provided by the newly-formed Designated Driver Labor Union ©Source: Daejeon headquarters of the National Designated Driver Labor Union, part of the Korean Federation of Trade Unions’ Private Service Workers Alliance

Yeong-seon hopes that she and her husband can move out of the capital and work as designated drivers together in the relatively safe city of Cheonan. This is because she feels sorry for her husband, who has it worse than her, and because they have been apart often since early in their marriage. Also, this is the only kind of work they could do together—and maybe because, like a frog in a well, this is all she knows.

 

“I want to work together, and exercise together and see movies together on our days off. The money would be problem, and my husband’s never done any work other than truck driving. I think it’s his full-time job. But we’re apart all the time, and I hate that. I think this is the only thing we could do together.”

 

Besides that, she also wishes that the way people see designated drivers—especially female drivers—would change.

 

“The way men look down on women, where they jokingly tell dirty stories or proposition me. I run into it sometimes. When they won’t acknowledge that I’m a designated driver, a person who is taking them safely home, and see me only as a woman—I wish they wouldn’t do that. And there are some men drivers that say, ‘She’s a woman, why is she doing this?’ and that I’m taking food out of their mouths. Though they usually don’t say it to my face. I hear, ‘You must get big tips because you’re a woman,’ ‘Customers must like you,’ a lot. There’s nothing like, ‘Wow, you’re a brave woman!’ But beyond that, I just wish you all would treat us well because we’re the designated drivers—men or women—driving you safely. I wish that people wouldn’t call us and then cancel, leaving me stranded.”

 

In the current designated driving market, the number of people per day using a designated driver has reach 6-700,000, yearly sales are going astronomically high, and the number of designated drivers is approaching 200,000. Because they don’t sign a contract with the company, though, drivers are not recognized as laborers, and because they aren’t registered anywhere they aren’t considered individual business owners [like taxi drivers are], either. But the company says to them, “You’re responsible for yourself, your success depends on you.” They are in a kind of no man’s land of labor.

 

Yet there are no systems or policies in place for this industry. Not only are there no laws, there is no form of government oversight. And so the companies’ tyranny continues and the drivers’ situation continues to worsen.

 

Currently, a movement is arising to resolve these problems. A nationwide labor union and co-op for designative drivers has formed, and is lobbying Logi and designated driving companies to change their unfair practices. It is also calling on the National Assembly to make a “Designated Driver Law” to protect the rights and interests of consumers and drivers.

 

Because it is a job done mostly alone, though, and the number of new drivers keeps increasing, gathering power in one place is proving difficult. Designated driving, a job that stops drunk driving, prevents traffic accidents, and helps citizens get home or wherever else safely, needs a system in place that will help it move out of the shadows and become an officially-recognized profession. [Translated by Marilyn Hook]

 

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/6663 Published: April 30, 2014

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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