South Korea U-turns on 69-hour working week after youth backlash | Hacker News Reader

South Korea U-turns on 69-hour working week after youth backlash

theguardian.com

63 pointshalabarouma47 comments

69 hour work weeks!! This is a county that needs to liberalize their immigration policy to reduce the pressure on their citizens. People deserve better lives than 10 hours daily with no weekends or 12 hours daily with only Sunday off.

Without immigration, they will be forced to fix their broken system that has resulted in far-below-replacement fertility. With immigration, they can persist with this soul-crushing work schedule, while their native population dwindles.

There is not some fixed amount of work that needs to be done (in Korea specifically, that cannot be outsourced), and Korea simply doesn't have enough people to do it. In fact, if that were the case, then workers would have the advantage in negotiations, and could paradoxically bargain for better working conditions.

Korean work is hyper competitive. Few good positions, lots of highly educated people.

69 hours is a result of employees needing to prove loyalty and commitment, not that there is too much work to do.

Immigration would make this situation worse.

Can't blame them. This was very ill-advised. People need daily rest for health..

And, the government has gall to complain why people aren't happy and aren't producing babies.

As korean, President Yoon is anti korea and villan of korea. Everything of korea is getting worse and worse by him.

As someone living in Japan, I can't comment on his domestic policies (except this 69-hour proposal, which was utterly stupid), but at least he isn't like his predecessor, constantly vilifying Japan and trying to cozy up with NK. Japan and SK should be strong allies against the nearby dictatorial regimes, and the leftists in SK have been doing everything they can to ruin SK's relationship with Japan.

Because there is no rightist in korea to be honest. Most of Korean do not think like that. President Yoon and his father studied at Japan. Getting an apology from Japan's sexual slavery victims for the Japanese imperial army, it is not vilifying Japan.

Japan has issued lots of apologies over the decades for that, and paid reparations. The issue was settled back in the 60s. It's time to move on.

The left wingers just keep dragging it up so they can distract the voters from their own failures in governance.

Totally false. President Park even did not notice exactly information to victims from agreement between SK and JP in 2015. They always have been trying to hide information and ignore victim's opinion.

Man, this is an 80 year old issue. Move on already. The people that did that aren’t even alive anymore. And their offspring have a totally different government from the one that did the atrocities.

This is simply not how the world thinks. Look at the renewed effort for reparations in the US for example. Affirmative Action is an example of a form of reparation as well as black-only scholarships[0]. So thoughts like this do exist and are pretty widely accepted.

[0]: https://guides.library.umass.edu/reparations

> Japan has issued lots of apologies over the decades for that, and paid reparations.

I don't think any of those stuck. Japanese education and history still doesn't put on the forefront the atrocities. And that's the lens through which the whole region sees Japan. Until Japan owns their history and forms national identity around it, similarly to what Germany did, no apology will ever be believed to be sincere.

Instead Japanese companies, like Toyota, use their influence to suppress promotion of historical books documenting Japanese atrocities in the west.

Atrocities is not something you can apologize for and demand to move on. You never become ex muderer.

There is no ex murder to speak of, the murderers are dead by now

It was an analogy. Person committing murder is analogy for country commiting atrocities. If country doesn't accept having committed attrocities into their culture, education and history through and through, there's no hope for it to ever be forgiven let alone forgotten.

i have traveled through many countries and found this attitude to be extremely rare. most are easy to blame others for atrocities committed against them but extremely few were willing to admit their own atrocities against others.

germany is strongly condemning their own past so i guess this comes close. new zealanders feel some guilt about their treatment of the maori, and in other countries i came across the occasional critic, but only because the FOSS community tends to attract them. but general acceptance is almost nowhere to be found.

Yes, it's only human to resist thoroughly admitting fault and being faulty. But it's the only path to forgiveness.

So when is South Korea going to apologize for the atrocities they committed in Vietnam, and put that in their school textbooks, and form a national identity around it?

Probably no sooner than when they begin to really care about being forgiven by Vietnam.

> vilifying Japan

Did Japan ever stopped being a villain in that region?

I don't think it will ever stop being perceived as one as long it doesn't undergo cultural transformation that Germany underwent in Europe.

Ontop of this doesn't South Korea have abysmal pay and high cost of living compared to nearer countries.

And extremely aggressive taxation.

Not super defending this, but it is a maximum hours allowed. Up from 52, which to be fair I think many folks do work, all too regularly (probably many putting in unpaid labor beyond that!).

I can imagine being stuck out in nowhere on a job site with some mission to do and being told, no, I have to stop working, and not being pleased about it. Some things make sense to just hurry up and get done with. But that's not about anything we'd expect folks to sustain.

The 52h were "Democratic party that limits the working week to 52 hours: 40 of regular work plus 12 of overtime."

That gives you an opportunity to effectively pull an all nighter in an emergency once a week. I really don't see why any more would be allowed regularly. That would be a plain management failure.

Oh man, management failure in Korea? It would be a management failure to NOT be working workers to the legal limit and then some.

In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy. In Korea, leaving before your boss is hard to do. In Germany working hours are hard capped and that’s absolutely normal to stop working when your weekly allowance is over.

Some things make sense only because that’s your cultural normal.

> In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy.

Not really. The same dynamics play out in the US quite often. Not uncommon to be seen as slacking off if you consistently leave earlier than the boss, even if all your work is done.

Yeah, Germany... For the current project I have so much overtime, needed to stop writting down my working hours officially and only record them off-the-record. This is with a mutual silent agreement with my employer to afterwards simply not show up for some time as soon as the project is done. Because... Laws. We are afraid to even talk about it.

But to be fair, my employer wouldn't mind to let the project fail (It may very well fail anyway, btw). I am doing it voluntarily. He's not at fault at all, except for maybe allowing me to do it. I just love working on the project and try to get it done somehow, against all odds. Nevertheless, German laws now make something shady out of it.

On the other hand, this is not the first time I am doing so utterly stupid and partly self-distructive shit at work. But for sure it is the last time. I am never ever doing this amount of overtime again in my life. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind occasional overtime. But that's simply to much for too long now. I will barely go to work for several months in a row just to get rid of all that overtime, to give you an impression. (I know there is professions where people literally die, if people stop working similar hours. I am not really forced to do that so I am not complaining.)

I am glad my significant other is fine with it, since I barely caried any other responsibilities I should have... for a long time now.

Edit: I am not sure if there is actually special laws in Germany to avoid mutually agreed overtime. But there is for sure some rules where I work. Our company has a kind of special situation and strange laws surprisingly apply to us. Also it important to mention that if low performance and mistakes because of overworked employees happen nothing terrible will happen. You wouldn't want to have your medical devise be programmed by some sleep deprived idiot, but that is not the situation our company is in. If projects fail, nothing of importance is at risk. Many projects are of high risk and failing simply belongs to the business.

I don't really see this as a downside to the German legislation. If anything it's ... good? It gives the employee a ton of control over whether they do overtime or not. Yes, it's a bit weird that it's technically illegal... but if neither side complains then it's fine?

The power imbalance is so high that normally any scenario where you can 'agree' to work overtime usually leads to employees always having to technically consent or face termination.

It's not perfect but I don't know that there is a better solution given the power imbalance and the game theory of these situations.

Did you consider that you might not have the right contract for this type of situation? There a lot of jobs (hospitals, consultancy, ...) that do not fit the standard work agreement (08:00-17:00, 1h lunch, 40h/week). The law is strict here for the case that it turns out that your agreement was in fact not mutual and your employer expects you to work normal after your overtime phase without rewarding you for it. The german law is convoluted and can be inflexible but more often then not there are solutions. I am also not sure why you would be afraid talking about it?

There is up to criminal liability (jail) for an employer who knowingly lets workers exceed the allowed time in a way that risks the health of the worker.

>In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy.

Sort of, but only if you're salaried. The world of working extra hours as a blue-collar employee pretty much got demolished by overtime laws. If you do really low-value work, I imagine you even have some pressure to stay below ACA thresholds.

You are super defending it. Maximum hours allowed is what protects, not minimum hours. It’s already a hierarchical nightmare in South Korea. Underlings often keep their head bowed and do not make eye contact with their bosses. Speaking from first hand experience - for months.

Having a job and working in korea is so toxic.

> I can imagine being stuck out in nowhere on a job site with some mission to do and being told, no, I have to stop working, and not being pleased about it. Some things make sense to just hurry up and get done with.

This is exactly as intended. Especially if you are doing hazardous work that requires alertness, e.g. operating heavy machinery.

The standard solution is to get shift workers.

The problem is that this sort of "our one size fits all, we know better, peasant" thinking is that while it does reduce abuse by employers that constantly put employees in these situations it also fucks good employers and employees who wind up in these situations rarely and by happenstance and for whom just dealing is the all things considered best solution and the more extreme the rules the more of the latter group they hit. Of course one can always make some useless trite quip about how any situation like that could have been prevented had more resources been invested in preventing it ahead of time but at the scale of an entire economy this becomes stupid and a waste of resources as returns diminish.

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