Declining youth employment pushes more moms into work

By Kim Tong-hyung

The kids aren’t getting jobs, so moms are stepping in.

Employment among Korean women in their 40s and 50s is at its highest level in decades, official figures show, presenting a sharp contrast with the growing number of young people being sidelined from the job market.

More married middle-aged women are looking for jobs to cope with the acute squeeze in family finances caused by the mismatch between rising prices, stagnant wages and swelling debt. The need for extra income is greater for women in the age group as their spouses approach retirement and their children are in higher education, observers say.

The employment rate for women in their 50s was measured at 59.3 percent in the second quarter, the highest since hitting 60 percent in the third quarter of 1992, Statistics Korea said.

It was the first time since the third quarter of 1983 that economically-active women in their 50s were more likely to be on payrolls than people in their 20s, whose employment rate came in at 58.9 percent for the April-June period.

The number of 50-something women in paid employment reached 2.09 million in the second quarter, up more than 70 percent from exactly a decade ago and marking the first time they accounted for more than 20 percent of the county’s entire workforce.

The employment rate for women in their 40s was 65.9 percent, the highest since the 66.4 percent measured in 1983.

``Since a larger part of the country’s workforce was dedicated to agriculture and fisheries in the early 1980s, it could be said that employment among middle-aged women is now at its greatest since the country’s industrialization,’’ said a Statistics Korea official.

``The employment rate among women in their 50s, whose children would be in their 20s, is higher than the figure for 20-somethings. This could be explained by an increasing number of young people receiving higher education, which brings down the employment rate for the age group but puts more pressure on parents to secure more income.’’

The country’s unemployment rate stood at 3.3 percent in June, down 3.5 percent from a year earlier, as the country created more jobs. However, it’s hard to take policymakers’ claims of having unemployment under control seriously when their totals have been padded by middle-aged and old people with casual and precarious jobs.

Youth unemployment continues to be a problem, with the jobless rate remaining at 7.6 percent for those aged between 15 and 29.

In his inauguration speech last month, Strategy and Finance Minister Bahk Jae-wan promised that the government will work harder to create more jobs to help the middle class and struggling families see a larger cut of the fruits of economic growth. The government recently lifted its projection for job creation for this year from 280,000 to 330,000.