Young workers revolt against plan for 69-hour week

For Im, a 30-year-old who has a corporate job in South Korea, a typical work day starts at 9am and ends as late as 10pm. He works up to 70 hours on busy weeks, well above the 52-hour legal limit set by the government in 2018. There is no extra pay for the overtime he puts in, he says.

Im, who spoke on the condition that only his last name be used because he was not authorised by his employer to speak publicly, is among millions of

South Koreans in their 20s or 30s who were exasperated by last week’s proposal from President Yoon Suk Yeol’s administration to raise the legal cap on weekly work hours to 69.

In a rare policy reversal, the government will reconsider the plan after a vocal pushback from younger adults.

‘‘The president views work weeks longer than 60 hours as unrealistic, even when including overtime,’’ said Ahn Sang-hoon, a senior presidential adviser.

‘‘The government will listen more carefully to opinions from

MZ workers,’’ among others, he added, using the collective term commonly used in South Korea for millennials and those in generation Z.

By law, the South Korean work week is 40 hours, with up to 12 hours of weekly overtime, as long as the employer compensates workers with extra holidays or pay.

In practice, overtime frequently goes unrewarded, according to workers in their 20s and 30s. Employers nudge them to do leftover work from home in the evenings, they say, and in some cases accuse them of being inefficient to avoid legal scrutiny for the extended hours. Companies rarely hire more staff, because they either don’t have the financial capacity or because it’s cheaper to ask existing employees to pick up the slack.

South Koreans work an average of 1915 hours a year, while Americans work 1791 hours, according to the latest figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD average is 1716 hours.

As recently as 20 years ago,

South Koreans were expected to work 51⁄2 days each week. On Saturday mornings, children would go to school while parents headed to the office for a half-day. It was only in 2011 that the country fully adopted the five-day work week. Seven years later, the government capped weekly working hours at 52.

Im expresses doubt that South Korea’s birth rate of 0.78, the lowest in the world, will improve under a 69-hour work week. ‘‘Who’s going to take care of the baby if mum and dad are at work all day?’’