By Kim Tae-jong
Employment and Labor Minister Lee Chae-pil reaffirmed Monday a plan to include working hours on holidays and weekends as part of legally permitted overtime at companies. The plan is aimed at reducing the working hours of employees and ultimately creating more jobs.
“As the working hours on holidays and weekends are excluded in legally permitted overtime and unregulated by law, it has served as a loophole that makes it almost impossible to cut the total working hours,” Minister Lee said during a news briefing.
The government has introduced a mandatory 40-hour, 5-day work week, and limited extra overtime work to less than 12 hours per week. But employers especially at big companies work much longer than the legally permitted 52 hours due to extra work on holidays and weekends, Lee said.
“The plan to simply regulate time spent working on holidays and weekends will cut overtime and consequently help create about 250,000 new jobs,” he said.
Lee also pointed out Koreans work longer hours but their labor productivity is much lower than members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
“The labor productivity of South Korea came in 28th among the 34 OECD member countries. But South Koreans work an average of 2,111 hours, much longer than the OECD average of 1,692 hours,” he said.
In this regard, he said reducing working hours through the improvement of labor productivity will bring benefits to employees and employers.
Lee emphasized the necessity of the revision of a related law to systematically reduce the working hours. The labor ministry will soon form a task force and discuss the issue with related bodies in the aim to submit a bill to the next National Assembly session.
“In 2010, labor, management and the government all agreed to reduce annual working hours to under 1,900 by 2020. But no progress has been made. So, without the revision, I think it will be impossible to make that happen,” Lee said.