Koreans Still Work Long Hours Despite Shorter Working Week
27 April, 2021
The mandatory 52-hour cap on the working week has not actually reduced office hours very much, a recent study suggests.
Nam Jae-ryang at the state-run Korea Labor Institute analyzed labor conditions by different profession in June 2018, before the cap was imposed for companies with an increase of than 300 staff, and June of 2019, using Labor Ministry data from 33,000 companies. He discovered that actual weekly working time declined by only 0.5 to 1 1.3 minutes.
The cap also had a minor effect on creating new jobs as new hires edged up only 0.2 percent to create up for lost productivity.
"We are able to say that enforcing shorter working hours is not that effective in reducing actual time spent at the job at least in the short term," Nam said.
But the study only covered large businesses with an increase of than 300 staff, a lot of which already had relatively humane working hours prior to the cap. Proponents of the cap say the results will only learn to show once businesses of most sizes start abiding by the brand new rules.
"The result of the reduced working week could be more pronounced in small and mid-sized companies than on big businesses," Nam said, "And SMEs will probably be less capable of working with it."
SMEs with staff of between 50 and 299 only started implementing the cap this January, and the ones employing five to 49 employees start in July.
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