The husband is a young intellectual who has returned home after studying abroad. His wife dreamed that he would land a proper job and build a happy household. But having failed to find work, he squandered his days on drink. Frustrated, she asks: "Why do you drink so much?" His shoulders slumping, he answers: "Society is what urges me to drink." Watching his wretched figure from behind, she lets out a heavy sigh: "Why does this wretched society urge him to drink!" In "The Society That Urges Drink," published in 1921, Hyun Jin-gun captured the frustration and helplessness of the young.
In his 2011 book "The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class," Guy Standing, a professor at the University of London, defined the "precariat" as those with insecure futures — unemployed young adults, non-regular workers, dependent contractors and owners of tiny businesses. The word combines "precarious" with "proletariat." The precariat is the young generation that has lost hope, blocked by a distorted social structure even as it wants to work, marry, have children and buy a home.
South Korea's young adults are now venting their outrage, gripped by a neurosis of the precariat. Job hunting has become not a narrow door but a closed one. Last month, the number of employed people aged 15 to 29 fell by more than 140,000 from a year earlier, shrinking for the 46th consecutive month. The employment rate for that age group stood at 44.1%, down for the 28th straight month, while the unemployment rate hit 5.4%, the highest in four years. Youth employment grows ever bleaker, yet the government and the ruling party cheer an improving growth rate riding on a semiconductor boom. It is textbook cognitive dissonance.
Solutions are urgently needed, but the worry is that policies being pushed to the front — cash handouts and the like — merely tap around the edges. Not a single minister has shown the resolve to break through the fortress-like resistance of entrenched unions and raise employment flexibility. To open up room for youth hiring, it stands to reason that the easing of the 52-hour workweek should be extended beyond the three mega special zones to all advanced industries, and that a blanket extension of the retirement age should be reconsidered. Advocating youth employment without labor flexibility is nothing but a trick played on the younger generation.
Young adults have moved past disappointment to despair over housing policy that repeats the proven failures of the Moon Jae-in administration. Repeated policy failures have sent home prices and jeonse — a Korean lease system requiring a large lump-sum deposit instead of monthly rent — and monthly rents soaring to the sky, while bank lending has been shut off, putting a first home out of reach. Last year, the share of people in their 20s and 30s who own the home they live in fell to 27.7%, below 30% and the lowest since 2017.
Conditions are likely to worsen this year. Last month, the average sale price of a Seoul apartment was about 1.6 billion won ($1.15 million), roughly 900 million won above the average jeonse deposit of 711.78 million won. Even the modest dream of renting on jeonse, scraping together savings and adding a loan to buy a home has become a luxury. For one-room units in Seoul's low-rise multi-unit housing — 33 square meters or less, the kind young adults most often look for — the average jeonse deposit in July was 219.36 million won and the average monthly rent 690,000 won. Scraping up deposit or rent money alone is suffocating, and buying a home is simply unthinkable. The bleak reality of having neither a steady job nor a home is weighing on young people's chests.
The Yong Hye-in affair, which tossed aside fairness and justice like a worn-out shoe, poured fuel on their anger. A satellite party born of partisan calculation, two terms as a proportional representation lawmaker and the controversy over holding a ministerial post and a proportional seat at the same time have betrayed the spirit of the age, which demands fairness. Young adults are waving off both the twisted face of the Basic Income Party and the mirror-image shamelessness of the rival parties. On top of that, the double standards of ministerial nominees have strayed from the common sense and expectations of the young. Allegations that Justice Minister nominee Kim Seung-won lobbied for approval of a clinical trial for a new drug, and a toothless confirmation hearing without witnesses, are far from fair. Nominees Lee Hyoung-il (Ministry of Economy and Finance), Kang Shin-chul (Ministry of National Defense), Hong Ji-sun (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport) and Lee So-young (Ministry of SMEs and Startups) drew frowns with property dealings that did not match their public words.
The young hearts of those in their 20s and 30s, the cornerstone of the Lee Jae-myung government's launch, are drifting away fast. Support among that group, well above 40% when the president was elected, has slumped to the 20% range in a single year. The ladders of employment and housing have been snapped in two, and fairness has gone missing. As promised in the pledge to be "a president for everyone," it is time to correct labor and housing policies painted over with ideology so that they fit reality, and to renew state affairs by recruiting talent regardless of faction. Young adults reduced to the precariat are watching every move of the presidential office, the government and the ruling party with wide-open eyes. They will walk into polling stations in April 2028 for the general election and in March 2030 for the presidential vote.
