I thought this was an onion article but guess what? It is real.
They are blaming literally anyone except the true culprits: capitalism…
Not surprised. Their current president is basically this writ large, one of his campaign promises was to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality. And he was elected.
If I recall he also wanted to remove the 100 hour/week working limit. I spent a few months in the ROK (and the DPRK) during grad school and you couldn’t pay me to live there. They make the Japanese work-life balance look healthy.
This guy just seems pretty standard for politicians there now honestly.
Besides the wild things described in the article, I was surprised to read the following crazy nonsense:
At the same time, a government think tank recommended that girls start school earlier than boys, so that classmates would be more attracted to each other by the time they were ready to marry.
Doesn’t surprise me in the least. Another way they decided to fix their birth rate was by giving one time lump payments to new parents. Which would definitely never be abused.
I can’t imagine working 100+ hour weeks is having any impact on their ability to have kids or anything like that.
It’s now planning on doing the opposite thanks to labor pushback. Now 4 day work weeks are being planned
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=376708
That’s tentatively great to hear, though I am honestly surprised that they got that pushed through there.
Now whether or not it will actually happen is something I’d like to keep an eye on. As an example, the employers side citing the freaking games industry as a good model of work-life balance is absolutely ludicrious. Hopefully the trade unions get more traction on their proposals instead.
Not Korea, but we have a similiar work culture with a lot of the same issues and been trying all sorts of reforms to cut back on people literally dropping dead from overwork and while there are some improvements, a lot hasn’t stuck. People often don’t report their working hours correctly, work without clocking in, and management sometimes looks the other way if they are benefiting.
Admittedly, our efforts were pretty lackluster. We tried a Premium Friday for a while that encouraged companies to give their employees the last friday of the month off. Besides having as much impact as a pizza party, I don’t know a single company that did it.
Women aren’t responsible. It’s CAPITALISM and OVERWORKING.
He said the country had recently “begun to change into a female-dominant society” and that this might "partly be responsible for an increase in male suicide attempts”.
He pointed out that globally more men took their lives than women. In many countries, including the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50.
Having capitalism strip your life of all meaning and dignity sure produces interesting forms of dissonance when you’re not allowed to criticize capitalism.
There’s a very radical femcel group in South Korea that celebrates the killing and abuse of cis men and trans people. I think they’re basically terfs who hate all feminist men and women. I think someone posted recently talking about them and how this group was at odds with some radical incel men’s groups. Very strange stuff.
The Onion stopped writing satire years ago and just forgot to tell anyone.
