Gov't hiring more low-paid workers; private sector fewer: Data

  • 5 years ago
The government has made job creation its top priority, but the jobs it's creating are not well paid.
Plus, many of them are low-skilled and temporary.
Our Choi Si-young reports.

Data from Statistics Korea show that this year only the public sector has had a net increase in what are considered low-paid jobs... where workers earn less than 18-hundred U.S. dollars a month.
And the increase was the biggest since that figure was first compiled five years ago.
In the first half of the year, the total number of these low-income workers in the public sector was about 400-thousand,... up nearly fifty-thousand from a year earlier.

Other industries including the manufacturing, construction, retail and lodging sectors all saw a decline in low-paid jobs.
For example, this year, the manufacturing industry... which hired the largest number of new employees... saw a nearly 230-thousand on-year decrease in jobs that are low-paid.

Meanwhile, the number of workers earning more than the 18-hundred dollar threshold increased in both the public and private sectors.

Overall, the sudden increase in low-paid jobs in the public sector helped keep the job market from deteriorating further.
But many of those new jobs are low-skilled and temporary, fueling criticism that the government isn't considering "quality" of the jobs it creates.

Just two weeks ago, the government promised to create nearly 60-thousand jobs in the public sector alone within this year.
Aside from questioning the plan's feasibility, worries persist among some experts about the quality and sustainability of such work.
Choi Si-young, Arirang News.

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