A New Employee Benefit?
It began with something small.
"Hana, what's your goal this year?"
Asked the question, Hana answered with a smile.
"Making the people at our company even happier!"
An ordinary child would have learned how precious her parents were simply by living beside them. Hana had no parents. What she did have were the many employees who filled that place. Whenever she wandered the building they greeted her, cooed over how cute she was, and even reached down to pat her head. She treasured them, and they treasured her just as fiercely in return.
Kim Sehee heard those words too. If it was something Hana wanted, Sehee could have plucked a star out of the sky and set it in her hands. Impossible in practice, of course — but that was how deep her love ran.
Turning Hana's wish over in her mind, Kim Sehee searched for a way to make the employees happy. There were plenty of options, but what she wanted was a benefit tied, somehow, to Starlight Food itself.
Hand the staff gifts with no thought for the cost, and running the company would surely suffer. Let the benefits fall short, though, and the staff would never be satisfied.
The best answer was a benefit that led employees to use up as much Starlight Food product as possible. Issue points that could buy only Starlight Food goods, for instance. Two birds with one stone: leftover inventory would sell, and the employees would feel as if free food had simply appeared in their hands.
Having thought it through, Kim Sehee decided not to choose alone. She would talk it over with the employees first, and settle on a benefit from there.
"The boss wants us to build a benefits system that actually suits Starlight Food?"
An employee on the Starlight Food operations team read the directive Kim Sehee had sent down. Scrap the existing distribution plan for Starlight Rice, it said, and put together a benefits scheme in its place.
"Hmm... so, for starters, welfare points go out to everyone working at Starlight Food, Distribution, and the research institute...?"
The system the staff had drawn up on Kim Sehee's orders worked like this.
Starlight Food would open an employees-only shopping mall stocked with the foods the company handled. Inside it: all kinds of vegetables, fruit, and rice. That Starlight Food harvested a wide range of crops was already common knowledge.
Produce the company didn't grow itself was nothing to worry about. Starlight Distribution already had firms managing that side; they only had to sign supply contracts with the farmers bringing in the harvest and move the goods along.
"So this means free side dishes and free rice, doesn't it?"
Every employee at Starlight Food, Starlight Distribution, and the institute would receive 400,000 welfare points a month, and with those points they could buy whatever ingredients they wanted from the online mall Starlight Food operated. Married households and people living alone alike had reason to welcome it.
Married households would receive still more points according to the number of children.
Lately the price of ingredients had been lurching so wildly that ordinary people were in pain. The unhappy truth about this country called South Korea was that it had never been able to stand the sight of food prices coming down. Up they might go; once they had gone up, they almost never came back down.
There was, after all, that invincible corporate logic. If ingredient prices fell, a company could not lower its own until the stock it had bought at the old, expensive rate — at home or abroad — had all cleared out of the warehouse. Let prices rise, though, and yesterday's argument seemed to slip straight out of memory; the price went up at once. Hang the rule on the nose and it was a nose ring. Hang it on the ear and it was an earring.
Of course a company sold that way to wring out every bit of profit it could. From a customer's seat, it was still an uncomfortable fact.
"How many people even work for Starlight Food, Distribution, and the institute? It can't be that many, since it isn't everyone under the Starlight Guild."
"One second. Let me check."
The employee pulled up the headcount for the companies tied to Starlight Food.
"Right now, the number of employees connected to Starlight Food is 10,320."
"Whoa. That many?"
"The company's been growing like crazy lately. And farming an area that huge — think how many hands that takes. Experienced hires, new grads, they're recruiting every time there's a gap, so the place is packed to the rafters. Benefits and wages sit above the big-company average, too."
Only half a year ago Starlight Food had not even had several hundred employees. Measured against that, this was progress by leaps and bounds — and the figure counted only regular employees. Add the subcontractors strung off the first-tier vendors, and tens of thousands of people would be working under Starlight Food and Starlight Distribution.
"And we're supposed to bring the subcontractor staff into regular employment, little by little?"
"Yes. Not all of them, though. It says to follow the rules the company laid down."
Having come in through subcontracting, their wages were lower than those of the regulars who had survived headquarters' brutal interviews. Even so, the mere fact that there was no risk of being fired was enough to make a job at one of the subcontractors a choice with real merit for people hunting for work.
The people upstairs had already raised the skeleton. All the staff had to do was put meat on the bones, and there was no easier job than that. Tell them to build the skeleton themselves and it would have been chaos — once a frame was set, revising it was hard. The moment management ordered a change, there was no taking it back. Now they only had to add a little detail to something already finished.
Kim Minsu was a new hire who had only recently joined Starlight Food, and even among his peers he counted as very lucky. His luck came down to this: he had put his papers in during Starlight Food's first mass recruitment.
A company of fewer than a few hundred people, suddenly hiring a thousand? It became the talk of students about to graduate. But those who looked into the firm could not hide their disappointment. They had been sure annual revenue would clear a hundred billion won; it turned out to be only a few tens of billions. A good company to land at, certainly — just not one that showed any particular reason to choose Starlight Food.
It looked like one of those firms that had nothing going for it but the name. Still, it carried the Starlight name, so perhaps it would be all right. Some students thought that way. Something good had to be happening, or why hire a thousand people? They were not taking only new graduates, either. Experienced hires were part of the intake.
Even so, it was a generation drowning in a shortage of jobs, and the competition ratio climbed past twenty to one. A thousand openings, and tens of thousands of applications. Set beside the production line of a famous automaker — a few hundred spots, two hundred thousand applicants — it could be called modest. It was still a company bearing the Starlight name.
There was a saying, of course: half the people who submit an application are phantoms. Anyone who had sat the civil service exam learned that soon enough. Half never showed up for the interview, or passed it and still never came, so the real contest was among the remaining fifty percent.
With that in mind, Kim Minsu walked into his interview. He had not come out of a prestigious university in Seoul, but he had attended a school in Gyeonggi Province. His grades were well kept, and he had a stack of awards to his name. Interviews, he had sat through more than he could count. Among his peers, he could fairly call his interview skills the best there were.
Having interviewed so often was not exactly something to boast about. It was proof of how many companies had turned him down. Still, surely he was better off than the people sitting their very first one. Companies did not go hunting for experienced hires for nothing.
In any case, he pulled himself together, took his shot, and came away with a good result.
The first thing Kim Minsu did, once he saw the acceptance notice, was bow to his parents. Watching how glad they were left him warm and proud. The joy, though, soon curdled into anxiety. Could he — a complete beginner at working life — survive something as rough as company life?
In his mind he pictured himself in an office, working hard at a computer. He also pictured himself getting thoroughly torn apart by a superior. Whether any boss would actually hand difficult work down to a newbie was an open question.
The job waiting for him after he joined was something else entirely. He stood now on a vast plain with a straw hat on his head. Rice plants spread out without end, a sight magnificent in itself. Korea was a country of mountains, so their shapes still showed in the distance, but a plain this broad and unbroken was a rare thing to see.
He had come in as the youngest member of the department that managed the Starlight Rice grown on these fields.