Many South Koreans are overworked and it's
not just a matter of packed lunches and late nights.
It's affecting people's health.
Death by overwork is so common that it has a name, gwarosa.
In August of 2017,
a middle aged man named Chae Soo-Hong collapsed at his workplace and died,
after having complained of being especially tired.
It was a Saturday,
and he had been working through his weekends since people could remember,
he would go to work at seven AM every day and come home at 10 PM,
until he just couldn't anymore.
A cause of death was never determined.
But his widow managed to win a rare gwarosa case against his employer.
But how did we get to this point and what can be done about it?
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD,
South Koreans work 2,069 hours a year compared to the average of a 1,764 hours.
Americans work a 1,780 hours a year,
that's 240 less than South Korea.
Recently, a video game developer died from
overworking after the crunch time right before the game was published.
One of his coworkers told the BBC in a covert interview that
another one of their team members had committed suicide six months before,
due to work pressure.
Video game companies have recently come under scrutiny for
their long hours and the phenomenon called crunch time.
It's when workers have to spend weeks working overtime and
weekends sacrificing almost everything to meet the big deadline.
Because most video game developers are salaried,
they're never paid overtime.
These factors can result in death from exhaustion.
But more often, they lead to mental illness.
South Korea has the highest rate of deaths by suicide among developed countries,
which researchers attribute to high levels of work related stress
and stigma against mental illnesses like depression and anxiety,
according to the World Health Organization.
South Korean police attribute 500 suicides a year to work related pressure.
South Koreans work harder than
almost every country and young people entering the workplace
are expected to conform to the norms of
long hours and not talking about the stressors of it.
Psychologist Dr Paul J.
Park lays out the cultural factors contributing
to the treatment barrier in his doctoral thesis.
He attributes the obstacles to getting help to a low trust of
strangers and the fear that there would be social ramifications.
According to The New York Times,
working long hours was seen as a badge of honor especially for the family breadwinner.
A compounding reason for the epidemic of overworking is a really tough job market.
Youth joblessness rates hit 10.5 percent in 2018,
the highest they've ever been since first recorded in 1999 by Statistics Korea.
There were 1.2 million unemployed people in May 2018.
A 126,000 percent increase from the year before.
President Moon Jae-In has said that his top priority is job creation for young people,
but his plans have yet to take full effect.
The problem of overworking was largely brushed under the rug,
until a high profile report of bus drivers falling asleep at the wheel and
causing fatal accidents opened up an examination of overworking culture.
In response, President Moone Jae-In launched a right to rest campaign that
aimed to cut the legal maximum of 68 work hours a week to 52 hours.
But policy makers have struggled not just to allow workers options to work
less but also to actually get them to use those options.
Seoul's government decided to take
an even more drastic option than just telling people to work less.
They shut down all government employees computers at night.
Starting in March 2018,
they pulled the plug on all computers at 8:00 PM,
and a month later, moved to an hour earlier to 7:00 PM.
You'd think that shutting down someone's computer would stop them from working,
but 67 percent of their workers applied to be
exempt from the forced shutdown according to the BBC.
But some workers are taking drastic measures to disconnect from their real lives.
After one of many 100 hour work weeks,
lawyer Young Son Quan decided that he was going to decompress by going into solitary.
Of course you can't go into solitary confinement at a real prison on a whim.
So he and his wife Ji-Hyang Noh started a jail spa called Prison Inside Me.
Prison Inside Me is technically a stress reduction facility that operates as a nonprofit.
It cost $90 a night to stay in one of
their 28 cells which is a 54 square foot room with a window.
Inside the room, there's a small table a cattle,
tea set, a diary,
a toilet and a wash bowl.
They receive two meals a day of rice porridge and pickled vegetables, and that's it.
The door is locked from the outside.
Much of South Korea's population is overworking.
But it's not just them,
Mexico has the highest average hours of work per year beating South Korea by 74 hours.
Costa Rica follows closely behind it at number two.
As young workers who do desire better
our work life balance gain more respect and power in the workplace.
It's possible that social norms will change.
But experts agree, it'll take a lot more 100 hour work weeks
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