Number of Short-Hour Workers Rising

By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter

The number of those who worked less than 3.5 hours per day on average reached 963,000 last year, accounting for a record high of 4.1 percent of all Korean workers.

Statistics Korea reported Tuesday that since the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the number of part-time workers has been on the rise, jumping from 1.6 percent in 1997 to 2.4 percent in 1998, to 2.9 percent in 2001 and to 3.3 percent in 2004.

People working 18 to 25 hours a week numbered 1.13 million last year, more than doubling from 558,000 in 1997.

The number of those working long hours, in contrast, has been declining over the same period.

The number of employees working more than 54 hours a week was tallied at 6.74 million, taking up 28.7 percent of all workers here.

The proportion of such workers has been steadily dropping since 2001, when they accounted for 42.1 percent of domestic employees.

The statistics show that there could be a larger "working poor" class than officially accounted for here.

"It looks like there is already a substantial number of jobless people in Korean society," said Jung Yu-hoon, a researcher at Hyundai Research Institute.

Such a change in working hours is partly attributable to the recent trend of avoiding overtime, as well as a rise in workers voluntarily turning to temporary jobs.

Korea's jobless rate soared to 5 percent last month, the highest since March 2001, and the number of the jobless hit a 10-year high of 1.22 million. The youth unemployment rate also rose 1.1 percentage points to 9.3 percent.

The Lee Myung-bak administration pledged it would create 1.2 million jobs during its term, but the results to this point are far from the target.

In 2008, the administration's first year, 145,000 more people were hired compared to the previous year. However, the number fell by 72,000 in 2009.

hckim@koreatimes.co.kr

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