Declaring 'Crisis,' South Korean Firms Tell Managers to Work 6 Days a Week
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
No better way to motivate young people to start a family, than to force them to work even more. Yes, I know this said "managers" - but let's be real, if your manager works 6 days a week, so are probably you too, in a country with work culture like SK.
> The number of young Koreans who opted out of the job market in May was recorded at about 400,000, the highest since 2020. Despite the government's measures announced last year to integrate this group into the labor market, their number increased again after nine months as the number of full-time jobs decreased.
> However, experts believe that such policies have their limitations if there aren't enough quality jobs for the 15-29 age group.
> "The impact of high interest rates and reduced investment following the pandemic has led to a decrease in quality jobs desired by young people," Kim Gwang-suk, head of research at the Institute for Korean Economy & Industry, said. "This situation has resulted in a decline in regular employment and a loss of job-seeking motivation among young people."
If you are older, you are likely trapped in your job and must do. If you are younger, you are likely not, and can opt out. Based on trajectories, what do we think will happen to more young folks who age into working age? Grind? Or opt out? Consider how this impacts total fertility rate, at a time when South Korea has set a record for lowest in the world.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-fert...
> South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, continued its dramatic decline in 2023, as women concerned about their career advancement and the financial cost of raising children decided to delay childbirth or to not have babies.
> The average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman during her reproductive life fell to a record low of 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022, data from Statistics Korea showed on Wednesday.
I feel like the endgame of our "line goes up for the wealthy" system is - people abandoning making other humans.
The amount of pressure on 20s/30s people is immense. A 9-month pregnancy, maternity, and parenthood has become so risky from a job/earnings perspective for an individual. There is zero stability. Even hunter/gatherer societies created stability for their pregnant women and children.
On one hand, we can say this work ethic/culture enabled them to go from third world to first in less than a century. But stretch it too much and the country suffers population collapse.
I wonder if being bordered by a rabid enemy (North Korea) also plays a role in the low birth rates. Maybe people don’t want to give birth to kids that might end up fighting war in the long run.
The hunter or the gatherer was not abandoned from the tribe/laid off/thrown on a PIP during a pregnancy for not finding enough fruits for the tribe CEO.
While the absolute conditions of hunter gatherers were abysmal compared to modern western standards, they didn't suffer relative decline in the living conditions due to pregnancy and child rearing. Their tribe took care of their house, food, security and child rearing. In other words, they had a community.
Today with the nuclear family mindset, if you don't have parental benefits, you will be hard pressed to figure out your rent, food or insurance and you will see a relative decline in your lifestyle. Humans have big aversion to relative declines even if their absolute lifestyle would still be better than their hunter gatherer ancestors.
So yes, there might be zero stability if your intention is to be a single mother. But I've heard that application of this novel idea could be helpful with these concerns. Maybe Koreans could look into this incredible new technology?
As americans says: "motion creates emotion!"
The west has a lot of inefficiencies that were never really tested before. Think ceos paying themselves huge amounts for short term thinking (Boeing), a lot of people living off generational wealth and not needing to contribute meaningfully, many examples of rent seeking, governments subsidising big businesses in response to political donations, etc.
Not that china doesn't have problems but it’s clear there’s now a competitor. The temptation here is to work the few who actually contribute even harder. Bump the working days, push retirement age up until it’s non-existent but whatever you do don’t touch the elite.
Opposite. It’s being caused by China’s slowdown. China is Korea’s largest trading partner [1].
It causes me to reflect, once again, that what we consider normal is somewhat arbitrary, and may serve someone else’s needs better than it does our own.
If the normal work week is defined as 4 days and people work 6 anyway we could count them as 6/4 employed.
If people work 6 days while 5 is considered normal in the rest of the world they would work 6/5.
With 5 days nothing really changes, it is hard to argue something improved without changing anything.
I do imagine that managers are a major source of counterproductivity, giving them extra shifts would create more work, perhaps even jobs.
But business seem to be stuck with "butt in seat" age mentality, so they aren't responding rationally to this
For those, like me, who have not previously heard of this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Korea really did earn its way off the back of its now elderly population slaving away for a better future for their kids. But right now the middle age people are slaving away for a better future for themselves and it's at the cost of the younger people rather than for their benefit.
My theory was that sending all the managers home opened their schedules considerably and so they coped with the emptiness by generating new work.
Suddenly when starting WFH the management required detailed time tracking and summaries of each day.
Somehow tracking productivity was not seen as neccessary when we were all sitting in a downtown office scrolling through Reddit with our headphones on, but it became a top priority when we started doing the same thing from home.
I got a call from a reasonably high placed sales rep who was upset I hadn't contacted his customer. I had to tell him:
"That ticket is a P3 and I currently have 3 P1s, 5 P2s and I don't know how many other tickets."
He asked I make his ticket a P1 (he had the authority to do so).
Hour later he called back to find out what we had done, the answer was "nothing". Again I had to explain:
"I have 4 P1s, 5 P2s and I don't know how many other tickets."
It's amazing how little people understand / care to understand that other people have work to do too...
In terms of self-preservation and your quality of life, I'm surprised you got that call and proceeded to take no action on his priority for an hour.
Bob was actually a good guy, his questions weren't unwarranted, it's just a really good story to demonstrate how people forget that other people are busy too.
This reads as a lesson in miscommunication more than mismanagement. On his first call, he should have explicitly asked for an ETA. (Even if the assumption was you would immediately start working on his ticket.) On the first call, after his ticket was escalated, he should have been provided with the new context.
The solution, ironically, might be inserting a manager between you and him who can better handle communication.
This was very much a situation where things just had to reach a certain point / inconvenience the wrong people before it was resolved.
Funnily enough Australia uses this very idea for terrorism. "We hear that terrorism threat may or may not be higher than yesterday." is a thing that Australian PMs do when things look bad or its a slow news day. They word it in such dumb ways as quote: "there is some extra terrorist chatter right now" [1]...
People in power can use fear of things to look like they're doing more work.
1. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/pm-warns-of-terrorist-ch...
Gen1: 100 people: 50 men + 50 women; 50 women have 25 babies
Gen2: 26 people: 13 men + 12 women (for math); 12 women have 6 babies
Gen3: 6 people
So 100 people end up having 6 total grandkids between all of them.
In the US, you hear about Boomer grandparents who have at least 10 grandchildren.
Even if they kept the 0.81 rate that they are on, then you'd get:
Gen1: 100 people: 50 men + 50 women; 50 women have 40 babies (40.5, but lest round to just 40)
Gen2: 40 people: 20 men + 20 women; 20 women have 16 babies
Gen3: 16 people
Given that the current average age of a woman at the time of her first birth in SK is 33 years old (!?!?!), you'd expect the 100 people of SK to be just 16 people somewhere near 2090. Meaning that it's current population of ~52M goes to ~8M in ~70 years. An 84% reduction in 66 years, or 1.28% per year.
And it looks only like it'll get worse for them.
I can't think of any war or plague or natural disaster or famine that has ever done such a number to a population of that size over that long of a time. Granted, that hasn't happened yet.
Still, whatever the hell is happening to them is something to be avoided like a war or a famine or a plague.
Total population has inertia, but anything more than +/- 2% out 10 years is pushing it and that uncertainty just grows with time.
Long term, the people born each year are children of people who decided to have kids which is counter to the overall trend in the country. There’s huge selective pressure around deciding to have kids in modern societies.
Immigration is a very dificult topic in both Japan and South Korea societies. The fact that EU is becoming increasingly anti-immigration won't help to advocate for this.
If there's far fewer parents because this cohort of potential parents is much smaller, then you have necessarily fewer children going forward. Even if you double the number of people that want kids, it becomes very hard to reverse the demographic decline, let alone grow your society. Even if you could, there's still a giant demographic hole in your population that will cause big issues over time.
Outside of immigration (which is a big discussion on its own) PLUS a healthy birth rate among these immigrants, I'm unsure where your optimism comes from for them reversing their demographics and growing.
(In practice, you'd probably expect NK's birth rate to keep dropping, too, and SK's will eventually reach equilibrium if it hasn't already.)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.711984...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...
Most of my data and observations are US centric; if you have data from outside the US, and I would love to review any citations you can provide simply out of curiosity from a sociological perspective.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/20/americans...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41053582 (citations)
> marriages where the husband is the primary or sole breadwinner has fallen steadily in recent decades, driven mainly by the declining share of marriages where the husband is the sole provider – this was the arrangement in 49% of marriages in 1972, while today that share is _23%_.
> share of marriages where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has increased from 5% in 1972 to _16%_ today
Well I would've expected that to be a bit higher, but that's still only a 7% difference which is extremely minimal given that it's not been that long historically since it's even been, you know... legal.
The rise of both having to be equal providers probably has more to do with the rising cost of living and flat wages than anything else. Some of that caused by suddenly having twice the workforce of course.
IIRC, the article I read about Korea said that the difference in Korea was much more stark, that men were twice as likely to want children as women.
The reasons cited for the crisis are "demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, changing attitudes toward marriage and gender equality, and rising disillusionment among younger generations."
This rhymes a lot with scarce resources: people lack the time and money to raise kids.
So maybe 1 more day off helps alleviate lack of time, but lack of money might persist if wages scale with hours worked.
some cultures really have a death wish
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/nx-s1-5027839/greece-six-day-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/01/greece...
Maybe falling fertility is the true capitalist death spiral?
https://www.ceda.com.au/newsandresources/news/tax-superannua...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-05-02/blackrock...
https://www.moneymag.com.au/aussies-not-enough-superannuatio...
> Labor groups claim the “crisis” and “emergency” measures are mostly for show.
Without further information, I think I agree with the labor groups on this one.
Although I say this, knowing my employer has poor strategy and more man-hours might help. What would help more though is consultants.
might be the way to pressure the rest of the company to follow suit, according to the article.
I rest my case.
They put in place a Korean-American country manager who was aghast at how much vacation time and public holidays Europeans have. The rift between the US and Europe is already sizable, but we’re talking major culture shock here.
Anecdotally, he was also a bit amazed when people started leaving the office before nightfall.
"Exempt" employee status is a real disservice in the technical field . With uptime and security issues constantly being identified and requiring immediate intervention its really allowed employers to exploit salaried employees to work extra hours without compensation.