Guidelines on Work Hours to Spur Job Creation
By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
The government will establish guidelines for working hours and encourage employers and employees to abide by the rules as an effort to create more jobs and help workers balance work with family life.
The Ministry of Labor Affairs plans to draw up the guideline by September, ahead of the G-20 Summit to be held in Seoul in November. The focus will be on encouraging workers to use all of their vacation and leave work on time while discouraging habitual overtime, it said.
"As we have become an aging society, we need to share the available jobs by simply abiding by the rules," a ministry official said.
The more workers and companies stick to the suggested working hours, the higher work efficiency will be and the more jobs will be created, the government hopes.
According to an OECD report in 2007, Koreans work for an average of 2,316 hours a year, the longest among the 30 member states.
This is far higher than workers in the U.S., who work 1,792 hours a year, and the OECD average of 1,768 hours.
In 2007, the International Labor Organization said that the productivity of South Korean workers is merely 65 percent that of other developed nations'.
Moreover, long hours expose workers to health risks. The number of those who took time off due to heart and vascular disease, the risk of which are known to be increased by excessive work, marked 514 in 2007.
Prof. Lim Jong-han of Inha University Hospital warned that excessive overtime can affect a person's melatonin level, which can increase the risk of diseases such as breast cancer.
"Excessive working during nighttime affects the secretion of melatonin, which controls hormones involved with cancers and diabetes," he said at a seminar in September last year.
Han In-im, a researcher at Green Hospital in Seoul, suggested that 40 hours a week is an appropriate amount when considering workers' health.
The government hopes that the strict observation of working hours will create more jobs. More than 1.2 million are currently out of work, the largest number in 10 years.
The major opposition Democratic Party said that sticking to the guidelines could create up to 2 million new jobs. "It is time we thought about working smart. It will also make room for family time, which could contribute to fighting the low birthrate," it said.