Business lobby pushes for shorter work hours

By Yoon Ja-young

The Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) is pushing for a campaign to shorten work hours as a means to make more room for employers to hire young jobseekers.

The chaebol mouthpiece suggested that shorter hours would benefit both employers and employees if labor accepts a wage decrease and management hires more workers.

“For successful adoption of shorter working hours, understanding and consideration from both labor and management is essential,” said Song Won-keun, head of the FKI’s economic research division.

He said that labor needs to agree with management on ways to enhance productivity in return for shorter work hours.

“If shorter hours would result in negatively affecting exports and output, employers cannot accept that,” he said.

The business lobby said that labor and management should be willing to understand each other’s positions for the common goal of creating more jobs and extending employment for veteran workers.

The FKI cited some cases where work hours were successfully cut to benefit both workers and management.

A food manufacturing company which runs a factory in Busan, for instance, had been applying a day-and-night shift system for its workers.

The employees, most of whom had been with the firm for decades, worked either the day or the night shift.

With surging sales, however, the company increased its production lines from four to seven, hiring many young workers in their 20s and 30s.

While the older workers were satisfied with the day-and-night shift system due to the additional allowances that come for the two-shift system, it wasn’t so with the younger workers. They complained of fatigue and many eventually quit.

This prompted the company to give up the decades-old two-shift system and switch to three shifts.

The measure cut each employee’s hours by around one-third, while the number of jobs increased 38 percent.

It also cited a chemical company which divided its workers into three groups to take turns on three shifts a day.

As the factory has to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, workers couldn’t enjoy their weekends.

Each of them worked six days a week, and had to work 12 hours a day on weekends. As they lacked time for leisure, workers increasingly demanded quality of life improvements.

Last year, the company decided to overhaul the shift system. Now, four groups take turns working the three shifts each day. As a result, they work on average 42 hours a week, which compares with the previous weekly 56 hours.

Thanks to lowered labor costs, the company plans to hire some 300 more people.

The FKI explained that conglomerates cut working hours for diverse reasons such as enhancing quality of life, helping newly hired workers successfully adapt to the workplace, sustaining elderly but skilled workers or normalizing the management of an ailing company.

“The firms that succeeded in cutting work hours through negotiations between labor and management are expected to enjoy benefits such as enhanced productivity in the long term, as labor and management come to build trust with each other,” the FKI noted.