A report showed Monday that employees with desk jobs retire earlier, by as much as eight years, compared to those in manufacturing posts, with an even bigger gap for those in larger businesses.

The report by the Korea Labor Institute surveyed 272 businesses with at least 100 employees in the manufacturing, finance and public sectors. It showed that the average retirement age of workers with desk jobs was 55.7. Those with manufacturing jobs retired at the age of 58.7 on average.

The prescribed retirement age by the companies’ regulations, however, was the same for all types of jobs, at 58 on average.

The biggest gap in retirement age among job types was in the petrochemical industry. While those with manual jobs retired at 58 on average, those working desk jobs retired at 50. A similar phenomenon was seen in the shipbuilding industry.


The steel industry, on the other hand, showed almost no gap between the job types in their average retirement age. The report cited a relatively larger number of companies in the industry with employment stability, such as POSCO.

“It is true that there are more demands on site for those with experienced skills in the manufacturing field,” Lee Ho-chang, a senior researcher at Korea Labor Foundation, told Yonhap News.

“It also seems that the lower participation rate among those with desk jobs in the companies’ labor unions also was a factor.”

The report also revealed that earlier retirement was more rampant in large companies than small and mid-sized businesses.

While the official retirement age for those with desk jobs at companies with at least 500 employees averaged at 58.5, the actual retirement age was 51.8.

The official and actual retirement age for those with office jobs at smaller companies that had between 100 to 299 employees was 57.8 and 57.6 respectively. Those in blue-collar jobs retired at 59.8 on average, meaning they worked past the official retirement age at 57.6.

The report said this could be due to active re-employment among the smaller companies with high demand for skilled workers with labor shortages.

It added that employment policies against an aging society should not just focus on alleviating personnel expenses, such as through voluntary resignation or a wage peak system, but comprehensively reconsider how to foster the retired workforce aged 60 and older. A peak wage system gradually decreases the salaries of employees past retirement age to make the employment market more flexible.

South Korea’s portion of the population aged 60 and over is expected to grow from 18.5 percent last year to 47.4 percent in 2060.

“Advanced countries such as Germany put much effort into advancing the work capacity and skills of elderly laborers through consistent re-education,” said senior researcher Park Myung-joon at the KLI.

“We must also reinforce such a retraining system and introduce a wage system that centers on job functions and skill levels as we prepare for the full enforcement of the extension of the retirement age to 60.”

The obligatory extension of the retirement age to 60 came into effect for all companies with at least 300 employees this year and will expand to smaller companies from next year. (khnews@heraldcorp.com)