The Republic of the Workaholic

The Republic of the Workaholic

There is no denying that average Korean people are hard workers. In the long-loved sitcom, Modern Family, Alex who is incredibly smart and competitive high school student in episode 5 said to her psychological therapist one day. “Did you have SAT or Asian kids in you school?” It indicates how hard it is for Alex to compete with Asian kids in her school. Korea and other East Asian countries have been accustomed to doing hard work by rice farming, which is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent size corn or wheat field (Ref. Outlier by Malcolm Gladwell p261~275). The heritage of our ancestors’ strong willpower and attitude runs in all Koreans’ veins.

This heritage intertwined with Korean people’s desperation not to starve to death after the Korean War and collectivism to reconstruct our country. Our previous generation literally worked their fingers to the bone to feed their family. Working hard has seated on Korean people’s lives and made them so competitive.  Very often, Korean people do things to the point of risking their own lives and are extremely goal focused.

Mimi and Eunice

Although Korean’s swiftness and diligence are incredible, many foreigners who experienced working in Korean companies have gotten an impression that Korean people are inefficient in a way. I read some complaints about Korean office workers hanging around, doing nothing, smoking like chimneys, taking coffee breaks every 15 minutes and many times, waiting for the boss to go home. From the outside, the employees in Korean offices always work overtime from 9 am or 10~12 pm almost every day, but if you look harder, they are just stretching their jobs out. No wonder Korean office workers look lazy and inefficient to outsiders.

But there are some factors that cause it to happen under the surface of what you see. I devoted a large space to explaining of Koreans’ obsession about asking each other’ ages from the start (https://shupoonkhouse.blogspot.kr/2017/08/blog-post.html). As many people already know, Korea is a hierarchical society. It takes a great courage for Korean workers to go home earlier than their boss. Korean workers always walk on eggshells around their bosses to see whether they are in good mood or not. Since it is so obvious that Korean employees can’t go home until their boss leave the office, there is no need to hurry to get their daily jobs done. In cases of big companies, a bureaucracy encourages this phenomenon. The last factor is the automation of business that is taking away many jobs from people. Recently, there is no such thing as a job for life any longer. The retirement age has come down to near 50. That’s why Korean office workers have to make themselves look busy all the time. Staying late in the office is one of the ways to look busy even though there is not much work to be done, which causes productivity to slip. Ironically, some departments and middle and small companies are very understaffed. Very often, the workers in those companies are doing the work of two or three people.

As Korea is becoming well off, Korean Parents, who got the Korean like typical disposition of swiftness, diligence and collectivism from their parents naturally push their children to get good grade in their school from the preschool by sending them to all kinds of academies. Going to several private academies is very common for Korean elementary students. Physical Education, Music and Arts in numerous schools are superficial and perfunctory. Parents’ intention is to make up for the insufficient education and have their child become well-equipped for the competitive Korean society, but too much is as bad as too little. What Korean students have achieved isn’t that extraordinary by comparison with what parents have invested.

Now, we can say that Korea has escaped poverty. Now is the time to sit down and calculate profit and loss. I know Korea can’t be turned upside-down overnight, but I just wish Korea would be the society that understands the common sense that getting second wind, recharging a dead battery, respecting subordinates and letting children run around as much as possible are the royal road to boost productivity and gain more profit.