South Korea’s National Assembly voted in 2018 to cut the legal maximum working week from 68 hours to 52. The cap took effect on July 1, 2018, starting with large employers. It was a campaign promise of President Moon Jae-in, and it passed by a wide margin over business opposition. The same year Moon also secured a 16% rise in the minimum wage.
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The new week is 40 regular hours plus up to 12 hours of overtime.
Why the government acted
South Koreans worked some of the longest weeks in the OECD, behind only Mexico, The Guardian reported in 2018. They put in about 400 more hours a year than workers in the UK or Australia, on broadly similar average incomes. That gap equals about ten extra standard working weeks.
Chung Hyun-back, the minister for gender equality and family, called the hours “inhumanely long”. She tied them to the country’s fast-ageing society, and the birth rate had hit a record low the year before. Supporters argued that shorter hours would raise living standards, create jobs and lift productivity.
The cost was the business case against it. A study by the Korean Economic Research Institute put the price of keeping output steady at 12 trillion won, about US$11 billion, a year.
What else the law changed
The law cut the number of industries exempt from the hours limit from 26 to five, including transport and healthcare. Workers under 18 dropped from 40 hours a week to 35.
Smaller firms got more time. Companies with fewer than 300 employees came under the cap in January 2020.
Who gained, and who did not
A study published by Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center compared surveys from 2014 to 2017 with data from 2019. Workers covered by the cap did work fewer hours, and their monthly spending on leisure rose sharply. Hours also fell at smaller firms that were not yet covered, which the authors counted as a bonus.
The picture was worse for precarious workers, those with the least job security. Their hours barely changed, yet their outpatient visits and monthly health spending rose a good deal. The authors read that as a sign the change may have harmed their health.
Job satisfaction fell for several groups. The researchers suggest that experienced staff, and those at large firms who still had to work overtime, carried heavier loads. Employment rose after the cap, but most of the new jobs were precarious.
The push to raise the cap again
By 2021 the average South Korean worked 1,915 hours a year, down from 2,163 in 2010. That was still 199 hours above the OECD average of 1,716.
In 2023, the government proposed letting weekly hours reach 69 during heavy workloads. It would have done this by letting firms settle overtime over a month, a quarter, half a year or a whole year, rather than one week at a time. After opposition from unions, academics and the press, President Yoon Suk Yeol asked officials to consider a 60-hour ceiling instead.
The Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Medicine opposed the plan. Its statement cited estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization for 2016. Those bodies put 6.9% of stroke deaths and 3.7% of ischaemic heart disease deaths down to weeks of 55 hours or more. The same estimates found 8.9% of the world’s population working such hours.
Korean compensation rules already treat an average above 52 hours a week, in certain kinds of work, as a factor that can make a heart or brain illness work-related. A 69-hour week, the society argued, would collide with that standard.
