By Bernard Rowan
Among OECD countries, South Korea's workers toil more hours but currently aren't as productive. Surely, part of the South's ascent came from the zillions of hours Korean men and women toiled on production floors, in government offices, and other places of work. Progress doesn't happen on one's laurels!
In the 80s and 90s, I remember thinking how odd it was to see many of my Korean friends return to work after dinner, sometimes going back after 10 p.m. Korean workers today show the effects of PTSD. They still work more than most workers on the planet, but the demands of 20th and 21st century work patterns have their costs. The health of Korean workers suffers. Han continues unabated. Many workers retire to lonely and meager livelihoods. Happiness wavers for the elderly in today's advanced society (and those in other countries too!).
Enter Moon Jae-in who wants to grow employment and productivity and improve life satisfaction by lessening work hours. The latest proposal is a 52-hour workweek. Moon and his party need to ameliorate the Hell in Joseon, in particular for younger workers. He wants to build on the compulsory retirement age and the five day workweek.
Is limiting work hours the needed solution? I'm not sure, but not for typically cited reasons. Journals such as the Harvard Business Review tout the benefits of reduced work weeks for health, productivity, and efficiency. But the main problem may be that most work proposals don't consider firm size. Employers of large-scale businesses can use their scale economies and workplace design. They set up hours decreases while limiting cost increases of more hiring. Small- and medium-sized firms can't. The recent minimum wage increase is good for workers' pockets but increases employer costs too.
The truth is no serious reform will occur without a sacrifice of profits by owners of capital. Widening inequality in incomes and wealth (extremes unknown in recent decades now appearing across the world) are the problem. Instead of taking a bonus, salary boost, stock option, or dividend, "reinvest that excess capital" in higher wages for less hours and more living wage jobs.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's recent proposal for a three-day 33-hour full pay workweek for the oldest workers is stale beer. It targets half the issue, the number of work hours, but leaves the issue of justice in pay to the side. A measure to save pressure on public pension coffers for older workers is just more of the same. It won't increase employment either. Businesses look for older, higher salaried workers to retire to free up revenues for hiring younger, less-paid workers.
Something doesn't come from nothing. Justice in a free society for employment and incomes won't work as a zero-sum game. The owners of production have fared well over the last fifty years, but they haven't seen fit to increase the wages, incomes, and living standards of their workers enough _ not hardly or nearly. On any reading of political history, the Moon proposals frame a step in a cycle of liberalization and progress that begs more fundamental reform. The proposals touch the nerve but don't cure the palsy!
The Shinsegae proposal to reduce work hours (seven hours a day for 35 hours a week) while preserving pay points to a better model. Of course, it doesn't work for smaller-sized and medium-sized companies (SMEs). And E-Mart workers are skeptical.
Present-day workplaces will achieve employment reforms better when they are not too small to promote wage justice for workers. In other words, we need fewer chaebol perhaps but also fewer SMEs. We need more companies with shared ownership and ideal workplace size to help wage justice reforms. That's the bane of the idea that everyone must own her or his business to be a scion or magnate, but nowhere does capitalism need the lone entrepreneur. Korea can imagine and legislate another possible harmony for Confucian capitalism as distinct from the individualist bias of European-American conceptions of the person in today's economy.
Bernard Rowan is associate provost for contract administration and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and former visiting professor at Hanyang University. Reach him at browan10@yahoo.com
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In the 80s and 90s, I remember thinking how odd it was to see many of my Korean friends return to work after dinner, sometimes going back after 10 p.m. Korean workers today show the effects of PTSD. They still work more than most workers on the planet, but the demands of 20th and 21st century work patterns have their costs. The health of Korean workers suffers. Han continues unabated. Many workers retire to lonely and meager livelihoods. Happiness wavers for the elderly in today's advanced society (and those in other countries too!).
Enter Moon Jae-in who wants to grow employment and productivity and improve life satisfaction by lessening work hours. The latest proposal is a 52-hour workweek. Moon and his party need to ameliorate the Hell in Joseon, in particular for younger workers. He wants to build on the compulsory retirement age and the five day workweek.
Is limiting work hours the needed solution? I'm not sure, but not for typically cited reasons. Journals such as the Harvard Business Review tout the benefits of reduced work weeks for health, productivity, and efficiency. But the main problem may be that most work proposals don't consider firm size. Employers of large-scale businesses can use their scale economies and workplace design. They set up hours decreases while limiting cost increases of more hiring. Small- and medium-sized firms can't. The recent minimum wage increase is good for workers' pockets but increases employer costs too.
The truth is no serious reform will occur without a sacrifice of profits by owners of capital. Widening inequality in incomes and wealth (extremes unknown in recent decades now appearing across the world) are the problem. Instead of taking a bonus, salary boost, stock option, or dividend, "reinvest that excess capital" in higher wages for less hours and more living wage jobs.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's recent proposal for a three-day 33-hour full pay workweek for the oldest workers is stale beer. It targets half the issue, the number of work hours, but leaves the issue of justice in pay to the side. A measure to save pressure on public pension coffers for older workers is just more of the same. It won't increase employment either. Businesses look for older, higher salaried workers to retire to free up revenues for hiring younger, less-paid workers.
Something doesn't come from nothing. Justice in a free society for employment and incomes won't work as a zero-sum game. The owners of production have fared well over the last fifty years, but they haven't seen fit to increase the wages, incomes, and living standards of their workers enough _ not hardly or nearly. On any reading of political history, the Moon proposals frame a step in a cycle of liberalization and progress that begs more fundamental reform. The proposals touch the nerve but don't cure the palsy!
The Shinsegae proposal to reduce work hours (seven hours a day for 35 hours a week) while preserving pay points to a better model. Of course, it doesn't work for smaller-sized and medium-sized companies (SMEs). And E-Mart workers are skeptical.
Present-day workplaces will achieve employment reforms better when they are not too small to promote wage justice for workers. In other words, we need fewer chaebol perhaps but also fewer SMEs. We need more companies with shared ownership and ideal workplace size to help wage justice reforms. That's the bane of the idea that everyone must own her or his business to be a scion or magnate, but nowhere does capitalism need the lone entrepreneur. Korea can imagine and legislate another possible harmony for Confucian capitalism as distinct from the individualist bias of European-American conceptions of the person in today's economy.
Bernard Rowan is associate provost for contract administration and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and former visiting professor at Hanyang University. Reach him at browan10@yahoo.com
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