hankyoreh

Since my 20s, I’ve typically gone to sleep after 2 am. I’ve done most of my writing between 3 and 4 am. Even now, I’m writing this column at 3:30 am.

I started reading up on people who work night shifts. After that, I looked up statistics on the gender and age of hard-up individuals who work long shifts for low pay and checked on employment trends since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Now I’m sitting down at my desk to write this column.

Studies on night work treat it as a class-two carcinogen. At the very least, it’s said to cause chronic sleeping difficulties. Whenever possible, humans ought to sleep at night. That’s demonstrated by research, and also through my own experience.

Though job numbers have fallen during the pandemic, there’s always a shortage of workers for the night shift, showing just how tough night work is.

Capital has no problem with viewing human beings as disposable. Round-the-clock work is the best way to keep the machine humming and to extract as much profit as possible from workers.

Working long hours wasn’t even regarded as a problem in Korean society until workers at Yoosung Enterprise, a car parts manufacturer, brought late-night work into the public discourse. The workers launched their labor struggle with the slogan, “We aren’t night owls.”

Koreans study for more than 10 hours a day in their teens and work for more than 10 hours a day in their 20s. A 2014 study found that Korea had the longest work hours of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, longer than even Mexico if you exclude weekends and holidays. Koreans worked for a total of 2,285 hours a year, an average of nine to 10 hours a day.

People in Singapore have told me that Koreans have a reputation for “dressing up and working long hours.” When one Korean was asked why she always bought similar work clothes when she went shopping, she gave the memorable answer that going to work was the only chance she had to dress up.

The nicest thing you can say to a Korean nowadays is to hope they work as little as possible while making a lot of money. That’s what happens in a society in which people work long hours for little money.

Lee Jeong-hui, an analyst with the Korea Labor Institute, draws a distinction between night work that’s oriented on profit seeking and night work that’s oriented on public services. Lee suggests limiting the former as much as possible and expanding the latter while providing those workers with bountiful support and protection and operating an appropriate system of shifts (such as a weekly rotation).

The fiercest opposition to such proposals is made by the companies involved. They say that such regulations end up ruining companies and destroying jobs.

But hypermarkets reported their highest margins when they were crushing people to maximize their profits. Despite the global financial crisis of 2008, Korea’s hypermarkets drove growth with an aggressive campaign of staying open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Korea’s enactment of the Distribution Industry Development Act in 2012, which forced hypermarkets to close two days a month and banned them from opening before 10 am, reportedly disrupted the growth trend. No doubt that had an effect, but that was the same time that hypermarkets around the world were losing ground in their competition with social commerce.

Facing a management crisis, hypermarkets have rushed to install self-checkout machines, taking jobs from female cashiers. I can’t help wondering where those workers have gone and what their current situation is.

The labor force participation rate of women in their 50s has continued to rise even after hypermarkets restructured. Indicators show that these women have gotten jobs in restaurants and hotels and in the health services sector as care workers. These are typically customer-facing jobs — the very jobs that have been hard hit by the pandemic. Even when work isn’t done face-to-face, women often work in cramped call centers and other places that are vulnerable to infection clusters.

According to an OECD report about employment prospects in the first half of 2020, low-wage precarious workers have less access to telecommuting, are at greater risk of losing their job, and have poor prospects for income in the months to come. On top of that, women are found to spend an average of two more hours a day doing unpaid labor than men in the COVID era.

This past September, employment trends in Korea showed that the number of female workers had decreased by three times as much as male workers. Here are some facts illustrating the gender gap today. People working in delivery and transportation are generally men in their 20s or above the age of 55. They work until shortly before death; sometimes, they even work themselves to death.

Meanwhile, women are fighting for their very survival, either facing a high risk of COVID-19 infection in their jobs, out of work altogether, or working without pay.

Amid the tidal wave of condolences for the death of Lee Kun-hee, I really wanted to write something for those who have nothing left to live for. I just wish I’d been given more space to write.

Kwon Kim Hyun-young

By Kwon Kim Hyun-young, women’s studies scholar

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