South Korea government proposes increasing cap on weekly work hours | Hacker News Reader

South Korea government proposes increasing cap on weekly work hours

washingtonpost.com

36 pointspseudolus19 comments

"South Koreans already toil more than many of their overseas counterparts. They work an average of 1,915 hours per year, compared with 1,791 hours for Americans and 1,490 hours for the French, who have a 35-hour workweek"

Oh no. Being in France don't know which is more embarassing : thinking that somwhere, someone is expected to work for 69 hours a week or being acounted for the country working the least hours per week and possibly being considered as lazy.

If I invented the croissant I would work a 35 hour work week too. I mean, how are you going to top that?

Actually, Croissant was invented in Austria according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croissant

Au contraire :

productivity per worked hours is one of highest in the world!

Why would French be afraid of being considered lazy, as the right to laziness has already been proudly argued for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Be_Lazy

South Korea: We have a record low birth rate. Why does no one want to have kids?

Also South Korea: You must spend every waking hour at you job.

IMHO and based on an earlier post about this: Title is misleading, it's not like Koreans have to work 52h/w, the regular time is 40h/w (although you can guess many people are careful to work more than that rather than less). The 12h difference comes from the fact that up to 12 excess hours per week are permissible, but must be exchanged for free time at some point (whether 1 excess h == 1 free hour idk), this gives employers some leeway to allocate working time where it's needed and employees the chance to swap excess hours for more contiguous free time for private stuff. This apparently worked well for them so now the government wants to go from up to 12h to 29h excess hours per week. 69h/6d == 11.5h/d, so that is a rather long work day but, depending on your occupation should be doable in many cases. According to the earlier discussion, this will allow some seasonal businesses to put the work where it's needed while still giving workers job security and free time where they are not as much needed.

Not wanting to paint a workers' paradise situation here, I'd have to know a lot more details. Just to put a counterweight to a "see in South Korea they now have 70 hour work weeks" knee jerk reaction.

IMO more flexibility like this and a greater share of income depending on a business's revenues would benefit employers and employees alike. Not in the currently prevalent situation, tho, where everything is done to squeeze the last penny out of everything including workforce while managers get golden chairs with golden parachutes.

Addition: both the Japanese and the S Korean governments have in the past been concerned about the deeply ingrained trend to spend too much time at work. One of their countermeasures was the introduction of the 'Golden Week' where they put many national holidays in close vicinity to each other during summer, enabling employees to have many consecutive free days with taking only a few 'bridge' days (between two holidays). Also of interest here, in Japan when a national holiday falls on a Sunday, the 'free' part of it gets moved to Monday, so workers don't loose it.

> Japan when a national holiday falls on a Sunday, the 'free' part of it gets moved to Monday, so workers don't loose it.

When I was on exchange in Japanese they did the opposite at university. If a national holiday fell on a weekday, the following Saturday or Sunday would be used to make up for it.

Golden week was accounted for so it didn’t require any make up days.

> Also of interest here, in Japan when a national holiday falls on a Sunday, the 'free' part of it gets moved to Monday, so workers don't loose it.

this is completely false. it only happens in certain situations and is far from a general rule.

So I have to be careful here b/c my experience is 30y old, so may be inaccurate or things may have changed since. But Wikipedia says:

Public holidays in Japan (国民の祝日, kokumin no shukujitsu) were first established by the Public Holiday Law (国民の祝日に関する法律, Kokumin no Shukujitsu ni Kansuru Hōritsu, lit. "An Act on public holidays"; Act No. 178 of 1948) of 1948. It has since been amended 11 times to add additional holidays, the latest being in 2018, for a total of 16 recognized holidays.

Article 3 of this law specifies that when a national holiday falls on a Sunday, the next working day shall become a public holiday, known as furikae kyūjitsu (振替休日, "compensatory public holiday", literally "substitute holiday").[3] Article 3 also determines that any day that falls between two other national holidays shall also become a holiday, known as kokumin no kyūjitsu (国民の休日, literally "citizens' holiday").

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_Japan)

So not 100% what I said—didn't know that bridge days are officially holidays, but not 'completely false' and 'not the general rule'.

One has to take into account tho that not everyone can take off on holidays; shops are generally open; department stores have their own holiday rules in Japan. Not entirely sure about Universities, but I seem to remember my school followed national holidays.

In China, you instead get make up days on Sundays or Saturdays which you have to work

Is the Golden Week because they don't have paid vacations? Why would many "consecutive free days" necessarily be better than off days here and there?

Because it could be socially enforced.

Ie. "You cant take Fridays off because thats when our clients are available" becomes "everyone takes Easter week off"

See: Australia. We have another holiday at the same time. Most people, who can, take the Good Friday week off. A few days of annual leave plus a couple of statutory days means up to 10 days off for the price of 3.

The expectation is that a lot of people are away then. It sucks if you need to get things done, but it works.

> Because it could be socially enforced.

Exactly this. As one salaryman (サラリマン) once explained to me, it's not the Japanese are terminally addicted to office work. It's when they don't show up, someone else will have to do their work, so while there is work, and be it after five, it would be unfair to leave b/c then all that happens is your co-workers have to do it anyway. A national holiday is an excuse / prescript that is doled out to everyone (except, you know, police, firefighters, hospitals, and shop clerks), so no-one needs to put it on their conscience.

Sure. Then management abuses the workforce by assigning too many work hours to a person instead of hiring more people.

You're probably not wrong, but then this is completely orthogonal to this discussion.

It's just nicer I guess. In my country if there's a bank holiday (or two) during a week many people take one or two days of vacation to bridge it to the weekend, or even take the whole week off. There's more "bang for buck" when you have, for example, 9 consecutive days off at the "cost" of 3 PTO days.

So now I got hooked to this: Say May 1st is a holiday but it's Sunday this time around. Sunday's free anyway, Monday's free, too, because they shift it. If it so happens that Wednesday is another holiday, then you can take Tuesday off to have four consecutive days off for the price of one (plus whatever free time you get on Saturdays).

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