By Choi Sung-jin
Two decades have passed since Korea became a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, but the country’s labor environment remains unchanged, a report says.
Working hours are still among the longest in the club of rich countries and the wage gap between men and women is widest among OECD member nations, according to the report, which the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI) released on Monday.
Korea’s gross domestic product, which stood at $656.8 billion in 1996, nearly tripled to $1.74 trillion last year, it said.
But working conditions have changed little.
Above all, Korea was at the bottom in wage disparity between sexes and the average period of continuous service.
In 2004, women received 39.6 percent less than men doing the same job (when men received 1 million won, women received only 604,000 won). In 2013, women still received 36.6 percent less than men, more than double the OECD member nations’ average wage gap between sexes, which remained at 16.6 percent. It was the widest wage gap among the 18 member nations that responded to the survey.
This also explains in part why Korea was bottom among 28 countries in the “glass ceiling index” survey by the London-based Economist magazine in May. Three Scandinavian countries -- Finland, Norway and Sweden -- were at the top of countries good for women to work in.
Korea’s average period of continuous service increased from 4.4 years to 5.6 years during the period, the shortest among 19 countries that replied, and fell way short of the OECD average of 9.4 years.
On the other hand, Korean workers still work too long. They worked 2,057 hours in 2014, 63 fewer hours than the 2,120 hours in 2008, but the nation’s ranking remained at the same, third among the 26 countries that answered. Koreans worked 350 hours more than OECD’s average annual working hours, which fell from 1,739 hours to 1,706 hours over the cited period, according to the FKI report.
Overall employment rate of men and women aged 15-64 rose from 63.7 percent in 1996 to 65.3 percent in 2014, but the nation’ s ranking fell from 17th to 20th place, and the hiring rate also fell short of the OECD average of 67 percent in 2014.
Likewise, although the economic participation rate climbed from 65.1 percent to 67.8 percent during the same period, Korea’s ranking dropped from 23rd to 26th, hovering below the average of 73.2 percent.
“This is mainly because of the rather low economic participation by women as well as the high youth unemployment rate,” said Song Won-keun, an executive at FKI, a lobby group for big businesses.
The labor productivity index showed the steepest rise in the past two decades, from 32nd to 28th place. Labor productivity, which refers to added value created by a worker per hour, almost doubled from $14.7 in 1996 to $31.2 in 2014.
But it still remained at 68 percent of the OECD average, which amounted to $45.6 in 2014. The average annual wage for workers also rose from $30,880 to $36,653 but fell far short of the OECD’s average of $39,909.
Nor has the dual structure of the labor market improved much. In the share of temporary workers, Korea’s ranking rose only one notch from 27th place out of 28 countries in 2003 to 26th place in 2014.
The job protection index of full-time workers fell slightly from 2.23 in 1997 to 2.17 in 2014, which also climbed by one notch, from 19th place in 1998 to 18th in 2013, as other OECD members loosened their protection of regular workers, the report said.