South Korea legislated a maximum work week after ranking among the OECD’s most overworked nations for decades.
In 2018, South Korea’s National Assembly amended the Labor Standards Act to cap the maximum work week at 52 hours, down from a previous effective ceiling of 68 hours that included virtually unlimited overtime.1 The reform applied first to companies with 300 or more employees, then extended to smaller firms in stages through 2021.
The context was stark. In 2017, the average South Korean worker logged 2,024 hours per year, the third highest among OECD nations and roughly 400 hours more than the OECD average.2 The country’s term for death from overwork, gwarosa (과로사), had entered everyday language.
The long-hours culture was a legacy of the country’s rapid industrialization under authoritarian governments in the 1960s and 1970s, reinforced by Confucian workplace hierarchies in which leaving before one’s supervisor was considered disloyal.3 Experts traced the pattern to Japanese colonial-era work values adopted during the early twentieth century, including the concept of myeolsabonggong, which encouraged workers to sacrifice personal life for the benefit of the organization.
Enforcement proved difficult. A 2023 Korea Herald report noted that many companies circumvented the law by reclassifying overtime as voluntary or by pressuring employees not to log hours accurately.4 In 2023, the government briefly proposed raising the cap to 69 hours per week to give employers more flexibility, but withdrew the proposal after widespread public backlash, particularly from younger workers who viewed the reform as a reversal of hard-won protections.
South Korea’s average annual working hours had fallen to roughly 1,872 by 2023, a decline driven partly by the law and partly by a generational shift in which younger workers adopted the practice of kaltoegeun, leaving the office precisely when the work day ends.5