Suppose a researcher spots a design flaw in a semiconductor late on a Friday, with a project deadline close at hand. Should the problem be fixed right away, or should it wait until the next working day? Korea's current work-hour system would answer: wait. And yet the global race for technological supremacy in semiconductors and artificial intelligence ultimately comes down to a single question — how quickly and flexibly can talent be deployed? In industries where losing a technological edge at a particular moment makes the gap almost impossible to close, such as advanced semiconductor process nodes or AI model development, flexibility in deploying the right number of people at the right time determines the technology gap. The problem is that Korean companies remain bound by a rigid work-hour system designed for the manufacturing era of half a century ago.
Japan and China, by contrast, are already putting work-hour flexibility into practice in their own ways. Japan has recently moved to ease work-hour regulations further. Its statutory working hours are the same as Korea's — eight hours a day and 40 hours a week — but overtime is managed on a monthly and annual basis, capped at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year, rather than on the weekly basis used in Korea. On top of that, labor and management can sign a special clause allowing overtime to be extended to just under 100 hours a month. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare had until now used administrative guidance to push even workplaces with such special clauses to keep overtime within 45 hours a month, but that administrative practice was abolished this month. The statutory ceiling on overtime itself is not changing, but administrative guidance will now focus less on total working hours and more on whether employers carry out "measures to secure health and welfare," such as raising overtime premiums and granting compensatory leave.
Japan has also secured broad industry-specific flexibility through a finely divided system of exceptions and special provisions. It allows the unit period for its variable working-hour system to run up to one year, compared with a maximum of six months in Korea, and permits a settlement period of up to three months under its flexible working-hour system across all industries, whereas Korea sets one month as the rule and three months for research and development. Japan also operates a system that exempts research and development work on new technologies and new products from overtime ceilings altogether.
China, too, backs work-hour flexibility with institutional support. With approval from labor authorities, companies can bundle working hours into weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual cycles and manage them as an average over that period under a comprehensive working-hour calculation system, giving them a wider range of choices than Korea, where working hours must be managed only on a weekly basis. China also runs a flexible working-hour system that exempts jobs difficult to manage under standard working hours, such as executive positions, from work-hour regulation altogether, and some local governments have recently been extending its scope to research and development roles.
While competing countries keep reworking their work-hour systems to fit the characteristics of national strategic industries, Korea remains trapped in a rigid framework that makes it hard even to run a single research and development organization properly. No matter how strong a country's technology and talent, it will fall behind if that capacity cannot be brought to bear at the right moment. Applying uniform work-hour regulation to every worker ultimately amounts to eroding national competitiveness from within.
This is not to say that work-hour flexibility should apply uniformly to all workers. But it is worth asking whether it makes sense to hold to uniform regulation even for national strategic industries. With the government now pushing legislation on a special act on mega special zones to nurture national strategic industries, there is a case for starting work-hour flexibility in those mega special zones before undertaking a full overhaul of labor law.
Priority items for review could include introducing a white-collar exemption that removes work-hour regulation for core personnel such as research and development staff and professionals, expanding the management unit for overtime from the current fixed weekly basis to monthly, quarterly, semiannual or annual periods, and lengthening the periods over which variable and flexible working-hour systems can be used. Support measures that exist in name only will not move companies. Without work-hour flexibility to back them up, investment will end up heading to other countries no matter how well a system is designed. Work-hour flexibility measures should be reviewed without delay to secure the global competitiveness of national strategic industries.
