The conservative government of South Korea he proposed to raise the ceiling on weekly working hours from 52 to 69, generating protests from the opposition and the unions, who fear that the new plan will have a highly negative impact in a country already known for its excess work culture.
The current rules, introduced in 2018, stipulate a 40-hour workweek plus a maximum of twelve hours of overtime, and companies that violate the 52-hour limit face severe penalties.
The government says the new plan would offer a solution to the problem of an aging population and the resulting decline in the workforce.
The South Korean Democratic Party, which is now in opposition and which introduced the 52-hour limit in 2018, says the new plan would allow employers to fire some workers and ask those who stay to work longer. . The unions have called the plan “an anachronistic idea”.
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South Koreans already work much more than workers in other parts of the world: the current legislation on working hours in Italy, for example, sets the normal average duration of a full-time employment contract at 40 hours per week, and in France has 35 hours. Experiments and studies on the so-called “short week” are also underway in Europe and the United States.
The government of President Yoon Suk-yeol, of the People’s Power Party, claims that the new plan is designed to give workers more flexibility and that, with the new rules, some of them could even have more free time than before, because it would introduced a limit on the hours worked each month, each quarter and each year.
Labor Minister Lee Jung-sik also explained that the new plan would prevent people from working more than 60 hours a week for more than three consecutive weeks, and that it is therefore possible that some workers end up with some work weeks of just four days. A compulsory rest period of 11 hours would then be introduced between one shift and the next. Critics of the plan, however, say the new rules do not take into account the time taken to commute from home to work and vice versa, and after-hours emails and messages.
The government wants to present the new plan to parliament by July, but the Democratic Party holds the majority and can therefore block the proposal.
According to the World Health Organization, there is a link between long working hours and a higher risk of heart attack and heart disease, and that working 55 hours a week or more is a serious health risk.