SK M&S Partners with Ministry of Employment to Promote Government-Certified Household Services

- Taking care of customers' leisure time and quality of life with a reliable lyrics service
- Through the life concierge platform Benefia

[(Left) Lee Jeong-sik, Minister of Employment and Labor, (Right) Park Jeong-min, CEO of SK M&S]

SK M&S Co., Ltd. (CEO Park Jeong-min) announced on Thursday, December 29, that it has signed a business agreement with the Ministry of Employment and Labor (Minister Lee Jeong-sik) to revitalize the government-certified domestic service market.

According to this agreement, domestic service providers certified by the government who join SK M&S’s life concierge platform, Benefia, will enable over 1.1 million customers from more than 3,700 client companies to easily use domestic services by utilizing welfare points. To this end, SK M&S and the Ministry of Employment and Labor plan to complete the onboarding of interested companies by the end of February next year and officially launch the service starting in March.

SK M&S plans to actively promote domestic services through promotions targeting all Benefia customers, including affiliates of the SK Group, to ensure the successful establishment of government-certified domestic services. Additionally, welfare services such as preferential health checkups, online shopping, travel, and leisure will be provided to employees of domestic service providers to enhance the welfare of domestic workers.

This collaboration is the result of a joint effort between the Ministry of Employment and Labor, which has been actively promoting the activation of certification agencies since the enforcement of the “Domestic Workers Act” in June, and the private company SK M&S. The Domestic Workers Act was enacted to convert the domestic service market, which had been operating in the form of job introductions and left in a blind spot of labor laws, into a direct employment system to create quality jobs and improve employment stability and working conditions for domestic workers. The activation of a quality domestic service market is also expected to significantly help dual-income households, which are steadily increasing, reduce the burden of balancing work, childcare, and housework, thereby maintaining their quality of life.

With the increase in dual-income families and the full-scale onset of the endemic phase, office workers are returning to their workplaces instead of working from home, and as lifestyles that value personal time and work-life balance spread, demand for domestic services such as laundry and cleaning is steadily increasing. However, it is not easy to find trustworthy domestic workers. According to the “Cleaning Service Status Survey” conducted by the Korea Consumer Agency in July 2021, the main reason consumers use cleaning services was “because it can be cleaner than doing it themselves,” accounting for 58.8% (294 respondents). However, from 2018 to 2020, among 3,025 consumer complaints related to cleaning services received by the Consumer Counseling Center, 44.1% (97 cases) were complaints about service quality.

It is also problematic that consumers find it difficult to resolve complaints about domestic services. It is ambiguous to hold intermediary agencies, which simply introduce domestic workers, responsible, and it is even more difficult to resolve issues amicably with the domestic workers themselves. Before the enforcement of the Domestic Workers Act, domestic workers were not guaranteed their rightful labor rights such as the four major social insurances, minimum wage, severance pay, annual leave, and paid holidays, so there was inevitably a lack of responsibility for the service. Through this agreement, Benefia customers will be able to receive reliable domestic services from government-certified agencies and are expected to benefit from institutional protections such as transparent usage fees and compensation measures.

Minister Lee Jeong-sik of the Ministry of Employment and Labor expressed gratitude to the companies that actively participated in the government policy and stated, “I hope this agreement will be a good opportunity for certification agencies to expand the domestic service market and a chance for partner companies to open a new welfare market.”

Park Jeong-min, CEO of SK M&S Co., Ltd., said, “Reliable and high-quality domestic services can greatly influence Benefia customers in securing leisure time and enhancing work-life balance,” and added, “We will explore various measures to activate government-certified domestic services.”