Park sets out to add 2.5 million jobs

Prime Minister Chung Hong-won announces a road map for a target employment rate of 70 percent at the Government Complex building in central Seoul, Tuesday. / Korea Times photo by Kim Joo-young

By Kim Jae-won

The government plans to create 480,000 jobs every year for the next five years to reach its stated goal of achieving a 70 percent employment rate.

Prime Minister Chung Hong-won disclosed a roadmap, Tuesday, which showed job sharing was the key to this ambitious objective.

“We will create a total of 2.38 million jobs, or 476,000 per year, by 2017. To achieve this, we will cut working hours by 200,” Chung said at a news conference.

Korea’s annual working hours totaled 2,092 hours last year, much higher than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 1,776 in 2011.

If everything goes as scheduled, average working hours will go down to 1,900 before President Park Geun-hye’s term ends.

The Ministry of Employment and Labor said the projected annual rise in jobs would double the 200,000 to 300,000 annual increase recorded for the past few years.

“We are looking to add as many jobs as possible to increase the employment rate to 70 percent,” said Hong Kyeong-eui, a ministry official.

Park vowed to increase employment rate _ number of employed to population of economically active people aged between 15 and 64 _ to 70 percent from the current level of around 63 percent.

Hiring part-time civil servants and public school teachers is also to be pushed from next year, however, the ministry said that numbers had not been decided on yet.

The Ministry of Security and Administration is collecting data from government offices to see how many vacancies there are, and will announce the numbers later.

Boosting the services industry is another key way of creating jobs.

The current plan seeks to add 16.3 million jobs in the industry over the next five years, focused on health and social welfare, science and technology as well as publishing and the media.

The services sector is one of the most popular topics for economists at home and abroad.

The country needs to bolster its services industry, but some are skeptical, saying the Korean economy needs to grow 8 percent to stay on the roadmap.

Economic think tanks expect the country will see its gross domestic product (GDP) expand 2 to 3 percent this year.

“This is very difficult task to reach a 70 percent employment rate under the current economic structure. The government needs to set up more long-term projects based on realistic plans,” said Lee Jun-hyup, an economist at Hyundai Research Institute.

Labor unions criticized the government over being obsessed with number of jobs rather than adding quality jobs for workers.

“The roadmap is based on enforcing flexibility of the labor market by creating more part-time jobs. The government is only interested in fulfilling the 70 percent of employment, not caring for the quality of jobs,” said the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, an umbrella organization of progressive trade unions.