The 52 working hours a week is an important issue in South Korea recently. The law, which, as its name suggests, limits the working hours of workers to up to 52 hours a week, has caused much controversy since the enactment of the bill, and as a result, it has been applied in earnest since April 2019 after a long grace period. More details can be found in the article below.

The biggest advantage that expected from 52 working hours a week is improving the quality of life. Recently, Work and life balance is big issue, the application of the bill will push the tide. Less working hours naturally increase free time. You can spend more time with your family or more time for yourself, such as self-improvement and hobby development.

The second advantage is more employment. Currently, many Korean workers work more than 52 hours a week. As seen in the image below, the percentage of workers who work more than 60 hours a week is 22.6%. It is more than four times higher than the OECD average of 5.6 percent.

If they can work only 52 hours a week, companies must solve the lack of working hours with more employment or hiring part-time jobs. It could be a good measure of rising unemployment.

The third is improving the efficiency of their work. People who work overtime everyday don’t work hard during regular work hours because they think they can’t leave work early anyway. However, if their working hours will be reduced by working hard and efficiently, the story is changed. To having less working time, people will work hard. Also, by improving the quality of workers’ lives, workers can work better.

Of course, this bill does not have only advantages. If it does, the bill would not have brought controversy even before its application. One of the possible problems is whether this bill can reduce quantity of work. Even if the work hours are reduced by force, the quantity of work remains the same, and the quality of life cannot improve. In addition, some companies already use tricks to avoid this bill by like working overtime outside the company. If this trick is not prevented, it will only increase informal work hours and improving the quality of life will be remote.

The second problem is the fall in wages. The decline in working hours leads to a fall in wages. This is not a big problem if worker is in large companies that pay enough. But what if it’s hard to live a decent life without overtime pay? they have to get another part-time job and eventually none of problem is solved.

The last problem is that some company don’t have a constant quantity of work. In that case of some IT or game company, they are sometimes very free, and sometimes very busy. It is hard for them to follow this bill. In busy season, they should be work more.

Despite these disadvantages, the 52 working hour a week should be applied. Korea is a country with a lot of work worldwide. Compared with countries of similar economic size, the gap is even bigger. Data on detailed working hours can be obtained from the OECD homepage below.

https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

Of course, many working hours naturally have a bad effect on our lives. Koreans’ satisfaction with life is very low.

In the above data, we can see that working time of Korea in too much and it cause a lot of problems. It is one of the biggest social problems. Thus, even if there are some problems, the benefits of the bill will be greater. When the five-day work a week was applied, there was a lot of backlash. But it was eventually applied well.

And some expected problem can be overcome. In that case of tricks of company, government can prevent with strong observation. If company are caught using tricks, government can give them penalty.

Plus, there are many complements to support this bill. One of them is flexible working. flexible working is to have flexible start and finish times. Employee can work less when free, and work more when busy. There is a brief video to explain about that.

Of course, there will be some problems in the beginning. But we can solve these problems. And ultimately, It is a way of progress to the better society.

Hello, visitors to my blog. Everyone would be looking forward my new post, right? I know.

Recently, I had an interesting survey in my class. The survey was about travel style. As you know, many college students enjoy traveling these day. Especially, spring is best season to travel. So, I wanted to know what kinds of traveler other people are. Well-organized? Or impromptu?

According to my survey, 77.3% of people prefer to search restaurants on SNS or Google Map in advance. In the case of transportation, 86.4% of people are looking for public transportation in advance. And about booking airline ticket and shopping, people have a tendency to become well-organized traveler.

Overall, well-organized travelers are more than twice as impromptu traveler. Actually, I though there is more impromptu traveler because we can get information more easily by smartphone. So we can travel easily without having to investigate beforehand. But many people prepare more in advance through smartphone.

you can see the infographic of survey in here :

https://create.piktochart.com/output/37917802-untitled-infographic