Less than a generation ago, South Korea held an unenviable distinction it has since tried to shed: land of the burned-out workers.
Burdened by obligatory company dinners and unspoken expectations to stay late in the office, South Koreans worked an average of 2,357 hours in 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most developed countries.
That figure — amounting to more than 48 hours a week if you factor in a typical three weeks of vacation — was 31% higher than in the United States and 70% higher than in the Netherlands, which ranked lowest.
Though the establishment of a 52-hour workweek in 2018 and other labor reforms led to big reductions, traces of that high-pressure working culture remain.
Logging an average of 1,872 hours a year — a 10-hour a week reduction — South Koreans now rank sixth in the 38-member OECD. Only Mexicans, Costa Ricans, Chileans, Greeks and Israelis work longer hours.
Many in the country now say it’s time for an even more dramatic step: switching to a four-day workweek.
The notion has taken on a special resonance in South Korea, where poor work-life balance is widely seen as one of the primary reasons for a nose-diving fertility rate, which politicians have described as a national emergency. As of last year, South Korea’s fertility rate is 0.72 births per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population.
“The reduction of working hours is the unavoidable call of the times,” lawmaker Park Hong-bae told reporters this month. “It is the key to solving the many challenges that South Korea faces today.”
As in much of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a fundamental shift in the way South Koreans view their jobs.
Reports of delivery drivers and other frontline workers dying of exhaustion fed a broader sense of disillusionment with the status quo, while those working at home found themselves questioning which of their day-to-day tasks were truly necessary.
Health workers check their protective gear outside a COVID-19 testing center at Incheon International Airport in 2023. As in much of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way many South Koreans view their jobs.
(Lee Jin-man / Associated Press)
“Working less is one of the only labor policy issues where support is high across both sides of the political aisle — especially among millennials and Gen Zs,” said Kim Jong-jin, a labor researcher at the Korea Worker Institute.
More than 60% of South Koreans in the labor force favor a four-day workweek, according to a survey last month by local polling company Global Research. Among workers in their 20s and 30s, that figure tops 70%.
Another survey, conducted last year by human resources company Wanted, found that over half of the 1,700 respondents preferred a four-day workweek even if it meant a reduction in pay.
Elsewhere in the world, the reduced workweek is increasingly being backed up by real-world evidence that it boosts productivity — and winning over believers.
With American workers reporting high levels of burnout, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill in March to enact a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.
Steve Cohen, the billionaire hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets, has predicted that the efficiency gains achieved by artificial intelligence will soon make a four-day workweek the norm.
In Britain, the majority of the 61 companies and organizations that participated in a six-month trial of the shorter workweek in 2022 — the biggest such experiment in the world to date — have made the change permanent, reporting better employee retention and higher on-the-clock productivity.
South Korean employers and politicians are also beginning to take notice.
Last year, Severance Hospital, one of the country’s largest medical institutions, tested out a four-day workweek for some of its nurses.
A medical worker walks toward Seoul National University Hospital. Last year, Severance Hospital, one of South Korea’s largest medical institutions, had success with its test of a four-day workweek for some nurses.
(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)
Though accompanied by a 10% pay cut negotiated with the hospital’s labor union, the program reported both a significant decrease in employee turnover and heightened patient satisfaction.
Following smaller-scale experiments by several regional governments to reduce working hours for civil servants, the government of Gyeonggi — the most populous province — has recently announced it would spend $7.4 million to launch its own 4½-day workweek pilot program next year, with around 50 private and public employers planning to participate.
The Korea Financial Industry Union, which represents the country’s bank workers, has framed its demand for a 4½-day workweek as a matter of national survival, saying that “the first thing that needs to be done to solve the country’s fertility crisis is reducing time spent working.”
In the final collective bargaining agreement tentatively reached with the union this week, employers stopped short of granting a full half-day per week cutback, but agreed to try a 30-minute reduction in daily working hours beginning next year.
Kim Jang-ung, a 32-year-old office worker at a major retail company in Seoul, said that an across-the-board four-day workweek feels like a far more effective pro-fertility measure than any current policy.
He and his wife have recently begun planning for a family, but he wonders how he will manage when he spends more than 12 hours of the day either commuting or at the office.
“I would like to have enough time to actually take care of my child,” he said.
Like his wife, who also works, Kim is legally entitled to a year of parental leave, and his company has a policy allowing parents to come into work a little later if they need to drop their child off at day care. But there is an unspoken stigma against making full use of these policies.
“Everybody understands that if you use your full parental leave, you’re not going to be promoted,” he said.
But South Korea’s small and medium-size companies, which employ the majority of the country’s workforce, say they are in no position to adopt a four-day workweek.
A man brings his daughter to a polling station in Seoul in April 2024. Some workers thinking about starting families wonder how they will manage when they spend more than 12 hours a day commuting or at the office.
(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)
Lee Myung-ro, head of the labor policy division at the Korea Federation of SMEs, said these companies are locked in a vicious cycle: Long working hours are driving away young workers, deepening labor shortages that further lower productivity and increase individual workloads.
Although South Korea ranks sixth in hours worked among OECD members, the nation’s labor productivity — as measured by GDP per hour worked — was ranked just 33rd out of 38 in 2022.
“The low productivity in smaller companies has to do with the fact that they lack the capital to modernize their operations with technology, as well as the fact that their workforces are rapidly aging,” Lee said. “There aren’t many short-term productivity-boosting measures they can take.”
But with no easy answers either way, he expects that there will still be employers willing to give it a chance.
“All of these companies know that young workers these days prioritize work-life balance,” he said. “The ones that have the ability to do so are certainly going to try it out.”