SEOUL, South Korea — It was an extraordinary outburst by one of South Korea’s most famous sons.

“People in the West just don’t get it,” stormed Kim Nam-joon, 28, to Spanish daily El Pais earlier this month, when asked if the notoriously intense training regimens for the stars of K-pop, the country’s world-conquering musical genre, were excessive.

“Just 70 years ago, there was nothing” in South Korea, Mr. Kim said, “but now the whole world is looking at Korea. How did that happen?”
Working hard, he said, punctuating his remark with an expletive, “is how you get things done!”

Mr. Kim is not a tough, hard-hatted laborer or a serious, besuited executive. Better known as “RM,” he is the frontman of the supergroup BTS, the face of millennial, moisturized South Korean cool. But his blood-sweat-‘n-tears work ethic may be putting him on the wrong side of a deep divide here over work, values and how to address deeply worrying population trends.

The 28-year-old pop star sounds oddly old-school — reflecting a dying breed of South Korean: the economic warrior.

South Korea’s famous/notorious work culture is currently in the spotlight, after the conservative government of President Yoon Suk Yeol on March 6 proposed expanding the allowable maximum working week from 52 hours (40 hours plus 12 hours over overtime) to 69 hours, or an average of slightly over 9.85 hours a day, seven days a week.

In a nation where those in the C suites agonize over rigid labor regulation, Mr. Yoon portrays the proposed increase as giving employees the option to work longer if they wish — hours they can take off later. He also wants to ease employment burdens on the mom-and-pop businesses that represent the bottom rung of this top-heavy economy: restaurants, educational “cram” schools, convenience stores, taxi services and the like.

The Korea Enterprise Federation and other smaller business groups have welcomed the plan, but there is vocal opposition, including from labor unions.

The 52-hour cap was instituted just five years ago by former President Moon Jae-in, whose opposition Democratic Party of Korea still controls the National Assembly.

“The age of growth by squeezing the people is now over,” thundered DPK leader Lee Jae-myung, who favors a 4 1/2-day week.

In the face of the backlash and global headlines generated by the 69-hour proposal, Mr. Yoon backtracked slightly and ordered the Labor Ministry to consider the views of millennials as it weighed how to implement the change.

But the plan remains on the table. Labor Ministry officials say they are tweaking the bill with the aim of presenting a final draft on April 12.

Only then will it be ready for the Assembly.

Economic surge, generational chasm

The debate and the popular pushback are a measure of how far South Korean society has evolved. A 69-hour workweek would have been child’s play for workers in the decades of the last 20th century when they were transforming the country into an unlikely global economic powerhouse.

The prosperous, democratic, liberal South Korea of today is far distant from the poor, authoritarian, tough land of yore. Following the devastation of the Korean War and lacking natural resources, the country turned to its people’s work ethic to lift it out of agrarian poverty. It was enough.

With government and business owners promoting a militaristic, ambitious, work-to-the-limit mindset, South Koreans forged what many consider an economic miracle, now ranked as the 13th largest economy in the world.

“The Koreans came up from nothing. … They worked 84 hours a week with no overtime for more than a decade,” Berkshire Hathaway Vice President Charlie Munger once noted. “At the same time, every little Korean came home from grade school and worked with a tutor for four or five hours… driven by these ‘tiger moms.’”

A 50-something Korean businessman who has taken over his late father’s company added another component: patriotism.

“My father’s generation were more patriotic,” the businessman said. “It was ‘You have to do this for the country! It’s a sacrifice!’ — added to a ‘can-do’ spirit.”

After overcoming the trauma of the Asia financial crisis of 1997, South Korea surged economically. Today it boasts global mega-brands like Samsung and Hyundai, a sparkling, high-tech infrastructure, and a globally admired popular culture.

“I consider the Koreans working from 1960 to 2000 the greatest generation: They lifted the country out of millennia of poverty,” said Mike Breen, author of The New Koreans. “But families and individuals did not necessarily benefit from macro success, as this was pursuit of national economic prowess, not pursuit of individual happiness.”

From economic warriors to cool Koreans

The “work-life balance” sought today is far removed from the experience of parents and grandparents. The older generation had little opportunity for – or understanding of — leisure. Only after a five-day workweek was instituted in 2002 did the concept of leisure, and related services that cater to people with time on their hands, take off.

Still, youth has not got it all easy. Social pressures to conform and excel remain, as K-pop’s Mr. Kim attests.

Younger workers have also witnessed the evaporation of “jobs for life” formerly offered, en masse, by corporations. Due to slowing growth rates, economic plateauing and corporate offshoring, top-tier careers and guaranteed lifetime tenures for workers have grown scarce.

Young South Koreans mockingly talk of “Hell Joseon” (the latter being the name for a Korean dynasty) for their stressed lives and worry about the concept of “gwarosa” —“death from overworking.” South Korea has the highest suicide rate among all OECD industrial nations.

Younger Koreans are giving up on bearing children, leaving Korea with the world’s lowest fertility rate — 0.78 children on average per woman — and a looming demographic crisis. The government has even pitched the 69-hour maximum work week as, paradoxically, a way to give young couples more time to start a family.

Labor Minister Lee Jung Sik sparked a backlash here when he argued that the longer legal work week would give workers the opportunity to build up overtime hours that they can bundle for later child-bearing and child-rearing periods.

“We’ll introduce bold measures to help cut working hours during pregnancy or while raising children,” Mr. Lee said when asked if the raise would help alleviate the fertility crisis.

Not everyone buys the argument, and say longer work weeks will do nothing to address the population crisis.

“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 protesting the proposed workweek changes.

Some see upsides to the changing South Korean attitudes toward work and leisure.

Venture capital, formerly the exclusive preserve of conglomerates, is now increasingly available for young entrepreneurs. Last year, South Korea hosted the world’s ninth-largest flock of so-called unicorns — start-up companies already valued at over $1 billion before their first offering of public stock.

The surging gig economy and work-from-home trend spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown are further undercutting old-school practices.

“For my father’s generation, an individual did not need anything: It was unity, you were a small nail in a tool box,” said the businessman.

“But that way of thinking will not work for my children’s generation, they want creativity and flexibility.”

New attitudes

They also want respect.

Managers formerly piled on work, kept staff late, demanded attendance at boozy, post-work bonding sessions, dictated vacation times and dished out angry criticism.

As work culture changed, gentler attitudes prevailed.

“The younger generation are more respectful of people’s time and more respectful that they have other pursuits in life – for example, family – than the older generation,” Mr. Breen, who runs a public relations firm, said.

Work itself has become an option.

“With increasing welfare you get a society where people who are unambitious will be taken care of,” Mr. Breen added. “This does not mean society will go down — you don’t need the entire society to be working on edge.”  

But the South Korean businessman, who has college-age sons, frets that today’s youth are better suited to the service sector than the manufacturing that remains the country’s economic bedrock.

“My sons can work out of bed on a laptop without having to be in an office or ever meeting a boss,” he said. “But this country is export-driven and you need people on-site inputting time. As long as this economy exists, labor hours are needed — not everything is Google and AI.”

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.