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

South Korea’s government has been forced to rethink a planned rise in working hours after a backlash from younger people who said the move would destroy their work-life balance and put their health at risk.The government had intended to raise the maximum weekly working time to 69 hours after business groups complained that the current cap of 52 hours was making it difficult to meet deadlines.But protests from the country’s millennials and generation z prompted the president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to order government agencies to reconsider the measure and “communicate better with the public, especially with generation z and millennials”, his press secretary, Kim Eun-hye, said.The core of [Yoon’s] labour market policy is to protect the rights and interests of underprivileged workers, such as the MZ generation, workers not in a union and those working in small and medium-sized businesses,” Kim said, according to the Korea Herald.Yoon, a conservative who is seen as pro-business, had supported the raise to give employers greater flexibility. Union leaders, however, had said it would force people to work longer hours, in a country already known for its punishing workplace culture.
The labour minister, Lee Jung-sik, had argued that raising the weekly cap to 69 hours would enable working women to accrue more overtime hours in exchange for time off later that could be used for family and caregiving commitments.“We’ll introduce bold measures to help cut working hours during pregnancy or while raising children,” Lee said last week, when asked if the raise would help alleviate the fertility crisis. Women’s groups, however, said that the measure would hurt working mothers and other women. “While men will work long hours and be exempt from care responsibilities and rights, women will have to do all the care work,” the Korean Women’s Associations United said in a statement.