President Park Geun-hye on Tuesday asked labor and management to come up with fundamental measures to address South Korea's rigid labor market by March.

The government is seeking to ease "inflexibility" in employment at large businesses and public companies as part of its structural reform of Asia's fourth-largest economy.

"Structural reform of the labor market is not a choice, but an essential task that our generation must accomplish," Park said in a meeting with top economic officials in the new administrative city of Sejong, about 150 kilometers south of Seoul.

Park visited Sejong to receive a briefing from top economic and other officials on the country's major economic policies for 2015.

She also said the reform of the labor market is the most important task in developing a strong economy under the three-year economic reform plan. The plan calls for, among other things, increasing the country's potential growth and employment rates to 4 percent and 70 percent, respectively, while also boosting its per capita income to over $40,000.

Park called on labor and management to make concessions to ensure that they can produce measures to reform the labor market.

One of the key issues of South Korea's labor market is a divide between regular workers and non-regular workers.

Critics say regular workers are being overprotected, a development that causes some companies to shun recruitment and instead rely on non-regular workers they can fire more easily.

The latest government data showed that the number of non-regular workers in Korea came to 6.08 million as of August, about 32.4 percent of the country's total salaried workers. It was the first time that the number of non-regular workers exceeded 6 million since related data started to be compiled in 2002.

She also said the ultimate purpose of structural reform is job creation, and reiterated her call for deregulation.

Park has been pushing to lift or ease all but core regulations to help reinvigorate the country's economy, calling unnecessary business restrictions "our archenemy" and a "cancer." (Yonhap)