It’s time to scrap Korea’s weekly paid leave rule

South Korea’s labor market has quietly reached an inflection point. Ultra-short-hour jobs—once an exception—have become a structural feature of employment. And at the center of this distortion sits a policy long treated as untouchable: weekly paid leave.

A recent study by the Korea Development Institute (KDI) shows that workers clocking fewer than 60 hours a month have more than tripled over the past decade, reaching 1,538,000 in 2024. Their share of total employment has more than doubled. Employers, it turns out, are not allergic to hiring. They are allergic to thresholds.

Under current rules, employees who work at least 15 hours a week qualify for paid weekly leave, triggering a cascade of additional labor costs—from social insurance to retirement benefits. The result is a sharp jump in average hourly costs, by as much as 40 percent, once the threshold is crossed.

Predictably, contracts now cluster at 14 hours and 55 minutes. This is not flexibility; it is regulatory gaming. The cost is borne by workers locked out of basic protections and by small business owners who stretch family labor to survive.

This is not a left-right issue. It is a design failure. A benefit meant to protect workers is now degrading job quality and shrinking formal coverage. As minimum wage talks begin early next year, the government should confront the elephant in the room: abolishing weekly paid leave and redesigning compensation in a way that actually expands protection. Bad rules create bad jobs. Keeping them out of ideological habit only guarantees more of both.