The after-hours text from a boss asking for “just one quick thing” may soon carry legal weight in South Korea — for employees, not against them.
The Ministry of Employment and Labor announced plans in late December to push new legislation through the first half of 2026 that would give workers the right to ignore job-related messages sent outside office hours, part of a broader package aimed at curbing the country’s notoriously long working hours.
The centerpiece of the plan is what Korean media have dubbed the “right to disconnect,” which would shield employees from being penalized for not responding to calls, texts or messages from supervisors after their shift ends. Under the proposal, companies that voluntarily adopt internal rules limiting after-hours contact — whether through labor-management agreement or company policy — could be recognized as model employers and receive government commendations.
The bill would also tighten rules around Korea’s “inclusive wage” system, in which overtime and other allowances are bundled into a fixed monthly salary — a practice long criticized for giving employers an incentive to demand unpaid extra hours. Under the revised rules, companies would only be allowed to use such arrangements with workers’ consent, or when they demonstrably do not disadvantage employees.
Separately, the ministry plans to formally write half-day leave into the Labor Standards Act. Annual leave is already a legal right in Korea, but half-day and quarter-day leave are currently offered only at individual companies’ discretion; under the proposed change, workers could take a four-hour half-day and leave without waiting through an additional 30-minute rest period, and companies would be barred from penalizing performance reviews or personnel decisions based on employees using their leave.
“We reached an agreement among labor, business and the government through extensive communication and compromise on measures to reduce working hours,” Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said, according to the Korea Herald, adding that the government would “fully support the passage of the agreed legislative agenda in the National Assembly.”
Korea’s real working hours — which include overtime and any work beyond legally contracted hours — stood at 1,859 in 2024, among the highest in the OECD. The ministry’s stated goal is to bring that figure down to the OECD average of 1,708 hours by 2030, and the disconnect-rights bill is designed to be one of several legislative levers toward that target, alongside the ministry’s separate push to subsidize 4.5-day workweeks at small and midsized firms.
Source: Lim Jae-seong, The Korea Herald, December 31, 2025.
