69 hour work weeks!! This is a county that needs to liberalize their immigration policy to reduce the pressure on their citizens. People deserve better lives than 10 hours daily with no weekends or 12 hours daily with only Sunday off.
Without immigration, they will be forced to fix their broken system that has resulted in far-below-replacement fertility. With immigration, they can persist with this soul-crushing work schedule, while their native population dwindles.
There is not some fixed amount of work that needs to be done (in Korea specifically, that cannot be outsourced), and Korea simply doesn't have enough people to do it. In fact, if that were the case, then workers would have the advantage in negotiations, and could paradoxically bargain for better working conditions.
I know, right? Or because a constant flux of immigrants is a totally sustainable situation..
We somehow need to be able to view immigration and its effects through a lens of reasoning, and not passionate politics. If you suggest that maybe, you know, a lot of immigration or immigration of uneducated workers is bad, automatically you are somehow far right.
Seems to have worked fine for the USA government and its constituents for the past 300 years. As long as you ignore the plight of indigenous populations, most of the big problems have been caused by the incumbent populations, not the immigrants.
The USA is a completely different situation. When Germans and Scandinavian immigrants came, for example, they settled the Midwest and had their own space. Immigration to existing heavily populated places, like Italian immigration to NYC caused huge problems (like the Mafia).
Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but america is completely ungovernable.
> Wow, so because there was an italian mafia in NYC, you conclude from that that immigration to populated places is bad?
The Italian mafia was pretty bad!
> As far as I know there were a lot of people trying to make money of selling booze during the prohibition-era, not just italian immigrants.
Also Irish immigrants. It wasn’t just Italians and Irish, but Prohibition may well have succeeded without immigration.
> There are a thousand reasons why the US is having a hard time politically right now, and none of them have to do with immigration.
The country’s current problems are deeply rooted in immigration, going back all the way to the dramatic expansion of the federal government under FDR, which was made possible only due to immigrants’ voting patterns. That pattern of newcomers using their numbers to change the politics of the host country is tremendously destabilizing.
> Do you have any more reasons for believing these things? Because if that's it, you're either willfully ignorant, or just very uninformed.
I’m an immigrant so I have every reason to be predisposed to viewing immigration positively. However, my family also left our homeland to come here, so I’m pretty skeptical about cultural change. If I’m being objective, I can’t help but conclude that it creates economic benefits while being detrimental to long-term well being and democracy.
More people means more people paying VAT, income tax, creating businesses, buying things, etc.
> If you suggest that maybe, you know, a lot of immigration or immigration of uneducated workers is bad, automatically you are somehow far right.
That's because nobody with your standpoint ever has any evidence to support those claims.
Also South Korea (and Japan for example) need to do something about their aging population. Investing in educating migrants is a whole lot better than destroying your economy because you can't pay pensions and don't have enough workers to keep your industry afloat.
while on the other hand, you have evidence to support that immigration is beneficial ?
the correlation between growth and immigration is because immigrants flock to affluent countries that are on the way up. correlation, not causation.
Well, certainly it's better to work everyone so much they can't enjoy anything about the country anyway. Certainly better than trying to get over your prejudices.
Your prejudice is that Indians would be a net negative to the economy. Even if they were only fit for lower-skilled work, they'd free up the native workers for native-specific jobs.
Societies aren’t just, or even primarily, economies. Immigrants also have an impact on the society and its culture. I once had a conversation with an American-raised Japanese person who had moved back to Tokyo as an adult. He was telling me about the frustration native Japanese had with his lack of knowledge and familiarity with Japanese rules and social customs. These are rules and norms children are socialized into from birth, by parents who experienced the same socialization themselves. People who don’t know the rules create friction in a well ordered society. I haven’t been to South Korea, but I don’t understand it to be materially different in that respect.
As someone from the subcontinent myself, I can pretty much guarantee you that a large influx of Indians wouldn’t be able to follow the rules of South Korea. It would create disorder and disharmony in society.
It would also be bad for the immigrants themselves, because they will never be integrated (South Koreans will never recognize immigrants on equal footing) and will become a permanent underclass. You see this with Turkish immigrants in Germany—and that is an individualistic western society. That’s going to be an even bigger problem in a more collectivist society like South Korea.
As someone living in Japan, I can't comment on his domestic policies (except this 69-hour proposal, which was utterly stupid), but at least he isn't like his predecessor, constantly vilifying Japan and trying to cozy up with NK. Japan and SK should be strong allies against the nearby dictatorial regimes, and the leftists in SK have been doing everything they can to ruin SK's relationship with Japan.
Because there is no rightist in korea to be honest. Most of Korean do not think like that. President Yoon and his father studied at Japan. Getting an apology from Japan's sexual slavery victims for the Japanese imperial army, it is not vilifying Japan.
> Japan has issued lots of apologies over the decades for that, and paid reparations.
I don't think any of those stuck. Japanese education and history still doesn't put on the forefront the atrocities. And that's the lens through which the whole region sees Japan. Until Japan owns their history and forms national identity around it, similarly to what Germany did, no apology will ever be believed to be sincere.
Instead Japanese companies, like Toyota, use their influence to suppress promotion of historical books documenting Japanese atrocities in the west.
Atrocities is not something you can apologize for and demand to move on. You never become ex muderer.
It was an analogy. Person committing murder is analogy for country commiting atrocities. If country doesn't accept having committed attrocities into their culture, education and history through and through, there's no hope for it to ever be forgiven let alone forgotten.
i have traveled through many countries and found this attitude to be extremely rare. most are easy to blame others for atrocities committed against them but extremely few were willing to admit their own atrocities against others.
germany is strongly condemning their own past so i guess this comes close. new zealanders feel some guilt about their treatment of the maori, and in other countries i came across the occasional critic, but only because the FOSS community tends to attract them. but general acceptance is almost nowhere to be found.
So when is South Korea going to apologize for the atrocities they committed in Vietnam, and put that in their school textbooks, and form a national identity around it?
Totally false. President Park even did not notice exactly information to victims from agreement between SK and JP in 2015. They always have been trying to hide information and ignore victim's opinion.
Man, this is an 80 year old issue. Move on already. The people that did that aren’t even alive anymore. And their offspring have a totally different government from the one that did the atrocities.
This is simply not how the world thinks. Look at the renewed effort for reparations in the US for example. Affirmative Action is an example of a form of reparation as well as black-only scholarships[0]. So thoughts like this do exist and are pretty widely accepted.
Not super defending this, but it is a maximum hours allowed. Up from 52, which to be fair I think many folks do work, all too regularly (probably many putting in unpaid labor beyond that!).
I can imagine being stuck out in nowhere on a job site with some mission to do and being told, no, I have to stop working, and not being pleased about it. Some things make sense to just hurry up and get done with. But that's not about anything we'd expect folks to sustain.
In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy. In Korea, leaving before your boss is hard to do. In Germany working hours are hard capped and that’s absolutely normal to stop working when your weekly allowance is over.
Some things make sense only because that’s your cultural normal.
Yeah, Germany... For the current project I have so much overtime, needed to stop writting down my working hours officially and only record them off-the-record. This is with a mutual silent agreement with my employer to afterwards simply not show up for some time as soon as the project is done. Because... Laws. We are afraid to even talk about it.
But to be fair, my employer wouldn't mind to let the project fail (It may very well fail anyway, btw). I am doing it voluntarily. He's not at fault at all, except for maybe allowing me to do it. I just love working on the project and try to get it done somehow, against all odds. Nevertheless, German laws now make something shady out of it.
On the other hand, this is not the first time I am doing so utterly stupid and partly self-distructive shit at work. But for sure it is the last time. I am never ever doing this amount of overtime again in my life. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind occasional overtime. But that's simply to much for too long now. I will barely go to work for several months in a row just to get rid of all that overtime, to give you an impression. (I know there is professions where people literally die, if people stop working similar hours. I am not really forced to do that so I am not complaining.)
I am glad my significant other is fine with it, since I barely caried any other responsibilities I should have... for a long time now.
Edit: I am not sure if there is actually special laws in Germany to avoid mutually agreed overtime. But there is for sure some rules where I work. Our company has a kind of special situation and strange laws surprisingly apply to us. Also it important to mention that if low performance and mistakes because of overworked employees happen nothing terrible will happen. You wouldn't want to have your medical devise be programmed by some sleep deprived idiot, but that is not the situation our company is in. If projects fail, nothing of importance is at risk. Many projects are of high risk and failing simply belongs to the business.
I don't really see this as a downside to the German legislation. If anything it's ... good? It gives the employee a ton of control over whether they do overtime or not. Yes, it's a bit weird that it's technically illegal... but if neither side complains then it's fine?
The power imbalance is so high that normally any scenario where you can 'agree' to work overtime usually leads to employees always having to technically consent or face termination.
It's not perfect but I don't know that there is a better solution given the power imbalance and the game theory of these situations.
Did you consider that you might not have the right contract for this type of situation? There a lot of jobs (hospitals, consultancy, ...) that do not fit the standard work agreement (08:00-17:00, 1h lunch, 40h/week).
The law is strict here for the case that it turns out that your agreement was in fact not mutual and your employer expects you to work normal after your overtime phase without rewarding you for it.
The german law is convoluted and can be inflexible but more often then not there are solutions.
I am also not sure why you would be afraid talking about it?
There is up to criminal liability (jail) for an employer who knowingly lets workers exceed the allowed time in a way that risks the health of the worker.
>In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy.
Sort of, but only if you're salaried. The world of working extra hours as a blue-collar employee pretty much got demolished by overtime laws. If you do really low-value work, I imagine you even have some pressure to stay below ACA thresholds.
> In USA people can make these calls with much autonomy.
Not really. The same dynamics play out in the US quite often. Not uncommon to be seen as slacking off if you consistently leave earlier than the boss, even if all your work is done.
> I can imagine being stuck out in nowhere on a job site with some mission to do and being told, no, I have to stop working, and not being pleased about it. Some things make sense to just hurry up and get done with.
This is exactly as intended. Especially if you are doing hazardous work that requires alertness, e.g. operating heavy machinery.
The problem is that this sort of "our one size fits all, we know better, peasant" thinking is that while it does reduce abuse by employers that constantly put employees in these situations it also fucks good employers and employees who wind up in these situations rarely and by happenstance and for whom just dealing is the all things considered best solution and the more extreme the rules the more of the latter group they hit. Of course one can always make some useless trite quip about how any situation like that could have been prevented had more resources been invested in preventing it ahead of time but at the scale of an entire economy this becomes stupid and a waste of resources as returns diminish.
You are super defending it. Maximum hours allowed is what protects, not minimum hours. It’s already a hierarchical nightmare in South Korea. Underlings often keep their head bowed and do not make eye contact with their bosses. Speaking from first hand experience - for months.
The 52h were "Democratic party that limits the working week to 52 hours: 40 of regular work plus 12 of overtime."
That gives you an opportunity to effectively pull an all nighter in an emergency once a week. I really don't see why any more would be allowed regularly. That would be a plain management failure.
