Jobs offered by government agencies and state-funded corporations accounted for less than 10 percent of the country’s labor market in 2016, government data showed Tuesday, amid President Moon Jae-in’s call for expanding public employment. (Image: Yonhap)
SEJONG, Feb. 27 (Korea Bizwire) — Jobs offered by government agencies and state-funded corporations accounted for less than 10 percent of the country’s labor market in 2016, government data showed Tuesday, amid President Moon Jae-in’s call for expanding public employment.
A total of 2.36 million people were employed in 2016 by the public sector, including the central and provincial governments and state-run financial and non-financial firms, accounting for 8.9 percent of the entire hires, according to the data by Statistics Korea.
Government ministries and agencies had 2.01 million employees in 2016, equal to 7.6 percent of the total, with the comparable figure for the state-run companies being 353,000 and 1.3 percent, the data showed.
The number of public jobs in 2016 increased by 29,000 from 2.33 million tallied in the previous year.
Some 86.2 percent of the public workers retained their posts in 2015 and 2016, while 13.8 percent of them were replaced by new faces after retirement or quitting.
By gender, men occupied 55.6 percent of all public positions, or 1.31 million, in 2016, compared with 59.3 percent for the country’s job market as a whole.
President Moon stressed that the public sector should take the initiative in creating jobs as the private sector has failed to generate jobs and fuel economic development in the past few years.
Creating quality jobs, especially for the young, was one of Moon’s key election pledges. The president has promised to add 810,000 new jobs in the public sector alone during his single five-year term, which will end in May 2022.
Moon has had several display panels installed in his office to check the country’s jobless rate and other job-related developments daily.
As of the end of December, the unemployment rate for young people between 15 and 29 years of age came to 9.2 percent, nearly three times higher than the overall jobless rate of 3.3 percent.
(Yonhap)
