This briefing comes from Korea View, a weekly newsletter published by the Korea Economic Institute. Korea View aims to cover developments that reveal trends on the Korean Peninsula but receive little attention in the United States. If you would like to sign up, please find the online form here.
What Happened
Implications: The Korean government is struggling to balance the public’s demand to better protect service industry workers while simultaneously helping the domestic retail industry lead the economic recovery. With consumption in the domestic service industry providing one of the few bright spots in the economy, policymakers maybe wary of regulating employers in this sector. Meanwhile, the government’s failure to extend protections will erode public support for the administration which had promised to build a more equitable society.
Context: Already, workers with part-time contracts were losing jobs at a rate 70 times greater than that of workers in full-time positions. In this environment, policymakers fear that introducing measures to protect workers in the service sector would lead to higher unemployment. To break the binary choice of protecting workers or sustaining economic activity, the government has proposed extending unemployment insurance to all economically-active citizens. The hope is that this will lead to better treatment of the workforce by reducing the employee’s dependence on bad employers.
Korea View was edited by Yong Kwon with the help of James Constant and Sonia Kim.
Picture from flickr user Arnaud Matar