During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) called upon the South Korean government to make the local labor market more flexible before anything else. In response, the government prepared the Act on the Protection of Dispatched Workers in February 1998.Still, the
At a recent symposium hosted by the Korea Economic Research Institute and the Korea Economic Association, OECD senior economist Randall Jones mentioned low labor productivity and strict regulations as two of the biggest factors hindering the growth of the South Korean economy.“South Korea’s product
The Federation of Korean Industries analyzed 14 labor-related indices and announced on July 8 that South Korea’s quantitative indices such as the rate of employment deteriorated compared to those of the other OECD member countries while its qualitative indices such as labor productivity remained bel
The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade (KIET) said on Sept. 16 that the labor productivity per employee of the Korean manufacturing industry edged up by just 0.5 percent last year, and declined by 2.7 percent in the first half of this year after the heyday between 2000 and 2010.The pro
The Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy and the Korea Productivity Center announced on May 7 that Korea’s labor productivity index, covering every domestic industrial sector, increased 1.5 percent from a year earlier to 101.9 last year. The reference point is 100 during the year 2010.The index show
A report shows that the labor productivity of service industry in Korea is merely 46 percent of that of the manufacturing sector, with productivity of intermediate industries such as the IT, finance, and insurance sector on the lowest spot among member states of the Organization of Economic Developm
Productivity growth without an increase in real wages has been most noticeable in Korea among the major OECD countries. In his report on an international comparison of productivity growth without real wage increases published on April 27, Park Jong-kyu, a researcher at the Korea Institute of Finance
Another storm is coming to the business community, this time in the form of a weekly working hour reduction from 68 to 52. Along with the ordinary wage issue that heated up throughout last year, the matter is signaling a tectonic shift in the way of doing business down the road.According to the curr
The Supreme Court finally delivered its ruling that regular and fixed bonuses are to be included in the scope of ordinary wages, even when the cycle of payment is over one month. The scope of ordinary wages had been the key issue surrounding many con- flicts between management and labor, because it