1 in 5 workers in South Korea are self-employed
Some 62.7 percent of the franchise branches spanning 15 major fields in South Korea were found to have no regular closing days around the year, a recent analysis of the government data showed Wednesday.
As of 2023, there were 270,086 businesses affiliated with franchises spanning convenience stores, eateries, bars, medical supply stores, beauty salons and other sectors of the service industry, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service of the Statistics Korea. But the agency's analysis on the franchise business showed that 169,364 of them did not have regular days off beyond government-designated holidays.
This excludes the headquarters of each franchise and any stores directly operated by the corporation. It only includes businesses that have acquired a license to operate under the specific franchise.
Nearly all (99.2 percent) of these convenience stores, many of which are conventionally operated around the clock, have no set days on which they close, with 99.7 percent of them being run more than 14 hours a day.
Around 81.4 percent of the shops selling coffee and nonalcoholic beverages had no regular holidays, followed by 78.3 percent of bakeries and 59.5 percent of pizza, hamburger and sandwich eateries. Next on the list were: bars (56.8 percent), foreign cuisine restaurants (52.1 percent), retailers specializing in glasses and contact lenses (52 percent) and Korean cuisine restaurants (48.4 percent).
Car repair shops (2.8 percent) and retailers for medicine and medical supplies (12.1 percent), as well as laundry shops (28.8 percent) were the lowest on the list.
Small business owners work longer hours
A substantial number of the franchise shops operate for a daily average of 14 hours or more, 72,972 in all or 27 percent. Bakeries were most likely to have long work hours, 34.3 percent open for 14 hours or longer a day, followed by those in the laundry business (24.3 percent), coffee and nonalcoholic beverages (19.1 percent) and shops selling stationary and painting supplies (18.8 percent).
The long operating hours of franchises do not necessarily correspond to the work hours for everyone working there, but reports do show that self-employed people in Korea work for longer hours than salaried employees do.
Self-employed conventionally refers to the owners of a relatively small business -- a category which most of franchise shop owners fall under.
A 2024 report by the Korea Labor Institute showed self-employed people with at least one employee worked for an average of 48.8 hours a week in August 2023, substantially longer than the 41.4 hours of salaried employees during that period. It also showed that people running a one-person business worked for 45.5 hours a week.
In comparison, the standard work hours in South Korea are 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week, with maximum of 12 hours of overtime work.
Roughly one in five working people in Korea are self-employed, with Statistics Korea data showing that 5.66 million out of the 28.62 million workers (19.8 percent) were self-employed.
According to a Bank of Korea report in March, self-employed people in Korea were making an average of 41.57 million won ($29,000) a year as of 2023, up from 41.31 million won in the previous year but not on the level of the 42.42 million in 2019, before the COVID 19 pandemic hit.
Statistics Korea's data shows that salaried employees in Korea made an average of 3.63 million a month in 2023, which is 43.56 million won a year.
minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com
