President Moon Jae-in said on the 15th, “As expected, employment statistics have confirmed that this is the most serious employment crisis since the financial crisis.” “Please take extra measures with extraordinary resolution that go beyond the employment countermeasures planned and planned in the phase of the previous employment crisis. I said. President Moon said at a meeting of senior advisors on the same day, and instructed to “promptly prepare special employment measures to improve the employment situation of young people and women.”
January hiring in disgrace. Graphic = Reporter Kim Young-ok [email protected]
This is the first time that President Moon has used extreme expressions such as’foreign exchange crisis’ and’historical level’ while referring to the employment situation. At a New Year’s press conference last month, he said, “Our economy is very good macroscopically,” he said only to the extent that “it may take longer for people’s lives and employment to recover.”
President Moon ordered an extraordinary measure because the number of employed workers decreased by 982,000 last month from a year ago, recording the worst decline since December 1998 during the financial crisis. It goes beyond’employment shock’ and is at the level of’employment disaster’. Looking at the employment trend of the National Statistical Office in January, the number of unemployed people increased by 417,000 in a year, reaching a record high of 1.57 million, and the unemployment rate soared 1.6 percentage points to 5.7%, breaking the 5% mark in 21 years. It has been 22 years since the number of jobs declined at the same time across all age groups, and the employment rate over the age of 15 was 57.4%, the lowest since 2011 as of January.
The fact that the worst records have been changed is largely due to the spread of the novel coronavirus infection (Corona 19). The decisive blow was that the number of employed aged 60 and over decreased in 12 years (-15,000), which increased the number by hundreds of thousands of people each month thanks to the government’s budget support.
Nearly one million jobs disappeared. Graphic = Reporter Kim Young-ok [email protected]
This is largely due to the end of the government’s public and welfare work projects in the winter. This is the limit of the so-called “public senior citizens’ Alba” policy that pays 200,000 to 300,000 won per month in tax. Such one-time jobs serve as a support in numbers, but when they are terminated, they confirm that they are vulnerable jobs that conversely reduce employment. Kang Seong-jin, a professor of economics at Korea University, pointed out, “After removing the’optical effect’ from large-scale financial jobs, the structural weakness of the Korean job market was revealed.”
Most of all, the youth in the graduation season were driven to a serious’employment level’. The perceived unemployment rate (expanded unemployment rate including both the unemployed and those who want to work more and potential job seekers) among the 15-29-year-olds is 27.2%, the highest since the statistics were prepared in 2015. At the same time, the number and proportion of women who gave up job hunting recorded a record high. This is the background of President Moon’s discussion of youth and women’s jobs.
This can be interpreted as the impact of the face-to-face service industry, which has a large number of youth and female workers. Professor Seong Tae-yoon of the Yonsei University Department of Economics said, “It is difficult to increase new jobs when the economy is bad in places where the job market is stiff like Korea. That is why the young people who have to find new jobs are particularly affected.” .
During the first quarter, the government directly supplied 900,000 jobs, provided emergency employment security subsidies and national employment support systems as countermeasures. In addition, it is planning to introduce customized job measures for the vulnerable, such as youth and women, in the first quarter. Professor Kang Seong-jin advised, “As the direct job policy that puts financial resources has clear limits, it is necessary to implement a policy that supports the creation of many good jobs in companies.”
Reporter Hae-Yong Hae and Tae-hwa Kang [email protected]