Workers seek 'right to disconnect'

By Lee Hae-rin

Jee Hyae-rim, 31, a Seoul-based office worker, gets off from work at 5:30 p.m. but is used to getting phone calls and messages from her bosses or colleagues as late as 7 p.m. or 8 p.m.

“I told them several times to send me an email unless the task is urgent, but they keep calling me. It's disturbing, but I keep checking emails and replying to the messages at home. The boundary between work and life is blurring,” Jee told The Korea Times, Tuesday.

Kim Hyung-chan, 28, another office worker in Seoul, said that working from home during the pandemic has further obscured the distinction between work and personal time. Kim says work-related communication interferes with his downtime.

This kind of work-related communication outside office hours is very common in Korea, with one out of three workers experiencing it at least once a week, according to a report released on Monday.

In the report written based on a survey of 500 employees living in Gyeonggi Province from Nov. 23 to Dec. 2 by the Gyeonggi Research Institute (GRI), 87.8 percent of the respondents said they have received work-related communications outside of work hours, and 34.2 percent said it occurs at least once a week.

Some 76 percent of them said they were contacted through mobile messengers including KakaoTalk, 69.2 percent said phone calls, 60 percent said by mobile text message and 38.6 percent by email, when multiple answers were allowed.

When receiving such messages, 90 percent said they completed the requested tasks at home before starting work the next day and 40.6 percent handled the work even when it was not urgent.

In Korea the “right to disconnect” is gaining momentum, yet it has been an issue for years in some other countries.

Since 2017, the labor laws in countries including France, Italy, Slovakia, the Philippines and Portugal have forbidden work-related communication outside of working hours. In January this year, politicians of the European Union led a legislative initiative to develop a union-led mandate on the issue.

Some local governments have similar regulations for civil servants, including Gwangmyeong of Gyeonggi Province and Seocho District in Seoul. Multiple bills to limit work-related communication outside of work hours have been proposed at the National Assembly since 2016 but were discarded or are still pending.

“The right to disconnect must be stated gradually in the labor law to enhance the balance between work and life in the digital era,” said Choi Hoon, a researcher at the GRI.