President Lee Jae Myung campaigned on cutting Korea’s statutory workweek from 40 hours to 36, without a pay cut, with an eventual goal of a 4-day, 32-hour week. The stated target: get Korea’s average annual working hours below the OECD average of 1,742 by 2030. Korean workers logged 1,874 hours in 2023, according to The Korea Herald (September 29, 2025) — well above that line, fourteen years after the five-day workweek itself was only fully phased in, in 2011.
The pro-reform case isn’t just about quality of life, though that’s part of it. Kim Hyung-sun, chief of the Korean Financial Industry Union, framed it ahead of a union strike as something closer to an economic necessity: “The 4.5-day workweek is not only the solution to overcoming the nation’s low growth and regional population decline… but also the only key to resolving South Korea’s low birth rates and sluggish growth.” That’s a big claim, but it reflects a real pattern in the policy discussion — shorter hours, better-rested workers, and more time for family life are being pitched as connected to Korea’s birthrate crisis, not separate from it. The Ministry of Government Legislation has a bill in the pipeline, tentatively named the “Reduced Working Hours Support Act,” that would pair the mandate with subsidies and tax breaks for companies that adopt shorter hours.
The business community’s objection isn’t “workers don’t deserve rest.” It’s a productivity number. In 2023, Korean workers generated $54.64 in GDP per hour worked — according to OECD statistics cited by the Korea Herald, that’s about half of the $97.05 produced by American workers, and well below Germany’s $93.72, France’s $87.30, and even Spain’s $70.60. A separate study by the Sustainable Growth Initiative, a think tank under the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, put Korea’s annual labor productivity per worker at $65,000 in 2023 — 22nd among 36 OECD countries, roughly half of Belgium’s $125,000 and Iceland’s $144,000, both of which have already adopted four-day weeks. The Korean Enterprises Federation’s objection follows directly from that gap: “When Korea’s labor productivity is far below that of advanced economies, simply reducing statutory working hours will undermine corporate competitiveness.”
There’s a second, less abstract worry, and it comes from small business owners rather than large employers. Song Chi-young, head of the Korea Federation of Micro Enterprises, pointed out that if shortened-hours rules eventually cover businesses with fewer than five employees, overtime pay kicks in starting Friday afternoons — exactly when foot traffic peaks for many small shops. “The burden will then fall entirely on small business owners, which will be difficult for them,” he said. Large companies can absorb a wage-hours mismatch through restructuring or automation; a five-person shop mostly just absorbs the cost directly.
The SGI study adds a data point that complicates the “just pay people the same for less time” framing: from 2000 to 2017, Korean wages and productivity grew roughly in tandem, both around 3.2 percent annually. From 2018 to 2023, that link broke — wages rose 4 percent a year while productivity grew only 1.7 percent. If that gap was already widening before any workweek cut, critics argue, mandating fewer hours without first closing it doesn’t create the conditions the reform needs to succeed on its own terms.
None of this settles whether the policy is right. Belgium and Iceland prove a four-day week and lower per-worker productivity aren’t mutually exclusive. But it does explain why the resistance isn’t simply old-guard reluctance to change — it’s a specific, numbers-driven argument that Korea is trying to adopt a structure built by economies that solved the productivity problem first, before solving the hours problem.
Sources: The Korea Herald, “Korea’s 4.5-day workweek plan stirs business backlash” (Ahn Sung-mi, September 29, 2025), citing OECD statistics and a Sustainable Growth Initiative (Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry) study.
