No sign of thaw in 'frozen' domestic job market

By Choi Sung-jin

The cold wave freezing the domestic job market will likely continue this year amid the gloomy economic outlook. Employers are expected to curtail new hiring and even trim existing payrolls as part of corporate restructuring, job market sources said Friday.

According to Job Korea, a recruitment portal, among 240 of the 500 largest businesses in turnover, 112 companies, or 46.7 percent, said they would not hire new employees during the first half of this year. Only 86 firms (35.8 percent) will employ four-year-college graduates in the first six months. The other 42 (17.5 percent) have not decided yet, it said.

Together they will hire 9,403 new employees, or an average of 109 workers per company, down 4.8 percent from the combined total of 9,878 workers last year. New recruitment by construction companies will fall 29.3 percent, followed by the drops of 18.3 percent and 9.8 percent for manufacturing and financial sectors, respectively.

More than 60 percent of petrochemical and manufacturing companies have no plans for new hiring in the first half, as do over 50 percent of steel, shipbuilding and construction companies.

In an earlier survey by another job portal, Incruit, of 822 listed companies, only 48.8 percent said they had recruitment plans this year, compared with 55 percent last year.

The frozen job market is not just the story of new entrants, the sources say. Many wage earners are living with constant fear of dismissal amid continuous manpower restructuring by banks and manufacturers hit by supply gluts.

According to a survey by Media Will, a flea market job site, of 751 workers, 82.8 percent have felt pressure at least once to leave their companies, and 69.4 percent are working with an uneasy feeling that they could be sacked any time.Unlike in the past, when workers in their 40s and 50s serving as managers or higher posts were the first to leave, rank-and-file workers are feeling greater pressure these days, the survey showed.

Employees felt particularly pressed when their companies’ bottom lines were in trouble or their departments were reduced or merged into others. Some 43.8 percent of workers left their companies after enduring such an atmosphere for several months, and 24.2 percent did so immediately, the survey said.