General economy : Economy : News : The Hankyoreh

South Korea’s youth unemployment rate has reached its lowest level ever since statistics were compiled in the first quarter of this year (January-March). It is difficult to see that the problem of youth employment, the representative ‘sore finger’ of the Korean economy, which has been considered a homework for each successive administration, has been completely resolved. This is because young people are mainly concentrated in restaurants and accommodation, which are directly related to the domestic economy, and the stability of employment is declining. According to the Economically Active Population Survey by the National Statistical Office on the 2nd, the unemployment rate among young people aged 15 to 29 in the first quarter of this year was 6.7% (279,000 unemployed out of 4.17 million economically active young people) . This is the lowest in the first quarter since June 1999, when the Office for National Statistics changed the job search period from one week to four weeks. Starting with 10.1% in 2000 (from the first quarter), the youth unemployment rate varied between 7 and 9% each year, before reaching a peak of 11.3% in 2016. This means that more than 1 every 10 young people who were looking for work were unemployed. However, after falling significantly from 9.9% in 2021, the Corona 19 period, to 6.7% last year, it remains at an all-time low this year. Compared to the reduction of 1.8 percentage points (5.0 → 3.2%) in the unemployment rate of the population aged 15 and over this year compared to 2021, the improvement in the youth unemployment rate is relatively remarkable.

The ‘extended unemployment rate’, which includes short-time workers (less than 36 hours a week) who want to work more and potential jobseekers who have not been able to find a job or have not been able to find a job because personal circumstances, also showing marked improvement. The extended youth unemployment rate in the first quarter of this year was 17.6%, down 5.5 percentage points from 2016. However, the tendency to improve indicators on the outside and the situation on the inside are very different. The distribution of youth employment employed by industry, published by the Office for National Statistics in May last year, was split into six industries and expanded and analyzed with the latest data for 20 industries in March this year using r ‘Economically Active Population. Survey Micro Data’ Only the ‘accommodation and restaurant business’ led to the recent increase in the number of young people employed. In March this year, the number of young people employed in this industry was 643,000, an increase of 90,000 compared to March last year. This is in contrast to the sharp drop in the number of young people employed in the wholesale and retail industries (-76,000) and the manufacturing industry (-50,000), where jobs have been directly hit by online shopping line and expand unmanned stores. In particular, at the time of the corona, the demand for labor increased, and the number of people employed in transport and warehouses, where ‘young riders’ were driven, increased by 41,000 compared to a year ago. Thanks to digital and non-face-to-face proliferation during the corona period, it seems that the transport and information communication industries, which led to an increase in youth jobs, are supported by restaurants and accommodation. The problem is that although the number of jobs for young people maintains the status quo, the quality of jobs is declining. In fact, an analysis of microdata by the National Statistical Office showed that the number of young regular workers (2.493 million) with a labor contract of more than one year in March this year fell by 45,000 from the previous year. On the other hand, the number of temporary youth workers (1,068,000) with a contract period of more than one month to less than a year and daily youth workers (138,000) with a contract period of less than a month increased by 13,000 and 10,000, respectively. Kim Yu-bin, a senior researcher at the Korea Labor Institute, said, “The lodging and restaurant industries are not industries with high employment stability because they traditionally have short service periods and very active job transfers.” noted The proportion of young people in the accommodation and restaurant industry increased from 26.5% in March last year to 28.4% in March this year. If domestic consumption declines in the future due to high interest rates and economic slowdown, young people will be the first to take a direct hit. It seems that the recent trend of young people gathering in an open KakaoTalk chat room called ‘Geogji’, criticizing each other’s spending details and emphasizing infinite savings is also linked to the expansion of unstable jobs.

The rapid increase in the number of ‘resting youth’ who are not counted as unemployed is also a painful aspect of our society. In the first quarter of this year, the number of young people who answered that they had ‘rested’ about their activity status increased by 5.1% from a year ago to 455,000, which is the highest ever in the first quarter. The ‘resting population’ usually includes a large number of the elderly and the elderly who are retired or in poor health. Although the situation is different for them, it is never a good sign that the number of ‘young people taking a break’ is increasing rapidly. Lee Seung-yoon, professor of social welfare at Chung-Ang University, said, “The self-reliance support policies are for NEET (young people not in education, employment or vocational training), young people who have given to up looking for jobs, and young people in seclusion, to whom the last government paid a lot of attention, seem insufficient with the current government.” He said, “Even if the youth employment policy is passive, it would be nice if the policy was at least to focus on the weak.” Reporter Park Jong-oh pjo2@hani.co.kr and staff reporter Ahn Tae-ho eco@hani.co.kr