By Andres Fernandez 
Photo Credit: AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon
The Background
The workplace situation in South Korea has attracted Western media’s attention and produced news articles from American media conglomerates like CNN and The New York Times with titles such as “South Korean Workers Turn the Tables on Their Bad Bosses” and “South Korean bosses can now be jailed for firing bullied employees as country cracks down on toxic work culture.” This sort of harassment has been recently targeted by the South Korean legislature, which in 2019 passed a law that would punish excessive and unfair “bullying” by bosses with a fine of 25 thousand dollars. Although reports of harassment have dimmed, there remains various concerns regarding workplace treatment and hours. In 2023, a survey found that around 50% of young Koreans desired better working conditions.
South Korea’s current president, Yoon Suk Yeol once described the working culture in his country by stating that “Working hard, overtime and sacrificing personal time is a virtue that one must have if one wants to have a successful career.” In his interview with Vice, President Yoon mentioned that the social taboo of not being perceived as “lazy” pressured him and his peers to overperform at work and ignore other aspects of their personal lives, like education, socializing, and relationships. Here in the United States, the average work week is 35 hours long. In 2023, protests and debates sparked as the South Korean government proposed raising the standard working hours from 52 to a maximum of 69 a week. The proposal came a year after President Yoon ran a successful presidential campaign in which he argued that a 120-hour work week was positive, a position he claimed was misinterpreted after backlash from his political opponents. “If a person works 120 hours a week, he will die,” said a spokesperson of President Yoon’s presidential rival, Lee Jae-myung.
According to a 2017 study by the Australian National University, anything over 39 hours of work a week results in detriments to the worker’s mental and cardiovascular health. Their conclusion points to a potential concern for all workers in South Korea, and may be exacerbated for Korean citizens working in medicine, an industry that has recently overwhelmed western workers, who experience rates of burnout of up to 90%, as was reported in an international survey published in the National Library of Medicine.
The Walkout
In South Korea on February 20th, 2024, thousands of doctors and medical professionals left their jobs in response to a government policy proposal to admit more people to medical schools. According to Reuters, authorities have stated that “more doctors are required in remote areas and to meet growing demands in a rapidly aging society.” The policy proposal comes as South Korea is faced with a rate of medical professionals to citizens much lower than in other developed countries. According to The New York Times, South Korean officials have predicted that “If the admissions quota is not increased — by 2035 the nation will have about 10,000 fewer doctors than it needs.” This is especially necessary in rural areas of the country, where the population is more vulnerable to a lack of medical access.
In an interview with The New York Times, Park Dan, the head of the Korean Interns Residents Association, claimed that “the medical system had been collapsing for a while” and that the government proposals were not seeking to address the institutional injustices, which was preventing him from “see(ing) a future for (himself) working in emergency for the next five or 10 years.”
According to South Korean national surveys, doctors in training regularly work over 24-hour long shifts. On average, medical workers have 80+ hours of work per week, and the compensation is less robust than in the United States, where an average physician pulls in over $100 thousand more than Korean physicians, who only make an average of 78 thousand dollars a year. Originally, the South Korean government did not attempt to increase the medical workforce by offering robust pay and benefits; instead, it increased the cap on medical student quotas while keeping benefits and salaries the same. As of Feb. 28, over 13 thousand medical professionals, primarily junior doctors or interns, have walked out. Compensation is where some of the striking doctors’ demands stem from.
The Collapse & Implications
Severance Hospital, one of the nation’s largest hospitals in Seoul, has canceled half of its services and medical procedures due to insufficient labor. On Friday, Feb. 29, an 80-year-old Korean woman died due to cardiac complications, and her death was linked to a lack of personnel and services. Before her death, paramedics in the city of Daejeon had called 7 hospitals to see if they could treat her; they all declined due to staff shortage.
The strike represented around 70% of the workload in medical centers. Their absence has damaged the proper functioning of hospitals and clinics nationwide. The striking doctors seem unwilling to return to work as long as the government officials do not provide them with a deal that they believe is responsive to their demands for better working conditions.
There exists broad support for the government proposal, and the public does not appear to approve of the medical personnel’s cause. A recent study found that as many as 76% of Koreans support the government’s plan. Beyond support for the proposal, some South Korean citizens have also expressed fear regarding the low hospital staffing rates and canceled procedures that have resulted from the strike. As Kim Myung, a 57-year-old cancer patient, put it, “What if your mother has to get an injection or die? It seems like those doctors never were in others’ shoes but are only emotional,” he also stated, “They don’t care about the patients but only the benefits they get as doctors in this country.”
On February 26th, 2024, Korea’s Vice Health Minister Park Min-Soo warned doctors that consequences would arise if they did not return to work by the following Thursday. He quoted South Korean medical laws, which allow the government to issue back-to-work orders with consequences ranging from 3 years in prison to fines of 23 thousand dollars or suspension of one’s medical license. Less than 500 of the 10 thousand doctors had returned to work as of Mar. 3, 2024.