SEOUL, Sept. 29 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s two largest automakers, Hyundai Motor and Kia, have agreed to broaden the scope of “ordinary wages” in their latest labor agreements, a move that could reshape labor relations and intensify cost pressures across corporate Korea. The accords, reached earlier this month, follow a Supreme Court ruling last December [...]
SEOUL, May 26 (Korea Bizwire) — Major electronics companies in South Korea are grappling with weak financial performance and rising labor costs, while automakers have experienced a relative decline in labor costs, a market research firm said Thursday. The Korea CXO Institute conducted an analysis of labor cost changes at major conglomerates between 2018 and [...]
SEOUL, April 21 (Korea Bizwire) — Major South Korean firms’ labor costs rose nearly 13 percent in 2021 from a year earlier, but their hiring activities remained sluggish, a corporate tracker said Thursday. The combined labor cost of 120 companies, which are the top businesses in the country’s key 12 industrial sectors by revenue, amounted [...]
SEJONG, June 15 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of “short-time workers” in South Korea reached an all-time high in May amid increasing labor costs, a report showed Tuesday. A total of 1.56 million employees in Asia’s fourth-largest economy worked fewer than 15 hours per week, according to the report released by Rep. Choo Kyung-ho of [...]
SEOUL, March 23 (Korea Bizwire) — The number of part-time workers in South Korea grew at the fastest clip among major economies over the past decade since the global financial crisis due largely to increased labor costs, a report showed Monday. The number of South Koreans working fewer than 30 hours per week came to [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 9 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean businesses are increasingly leaving the Chinese market due to the prolonged U.S.-China trade dispute, rising labor costs, and a general economic downturn. With increased concern over export tariffs due to the U.S.-China trade dispute, not to mention the slumping economy, many South Korean businesses are considering whether [...]
SEOUL, Jan. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s mom-and-pop stores on Monday called on the government to reflect their views in revising the minimum wage structure so as to minimize the fallout from rising labor costs. In a press conference held in Seoul, Choi Seung-jae, chairman of the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprise, whose organization [...]
SEOUL, Jul. 25 (Korea Bizwire) — A number of local companies that operated factories situated in the Kaesong Industrial Complex are relocating to Vietnam and other countries after being unable to deal with rising labor costs. According to the association of companies that has production facilities in Kaesong, of the 123 companies that operated factories [...]