Record number of Korean household heads doing side jobs

[Photo by Kim Ho-young]

A record number of household heads in South Korea are doing side jobs to make extra money, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The number of household heads with two jobs due to living difficulties soared by 41 percent in the past five years, with a total of 368,000 engaged in extra employment in the first three quarters of this year, showed the report from Federation of Korean Industries based on Statistics Korea data.

Heads of households took up 63.7 percent of the 547,000 people in Korea doing extra jobs in the first three quarters of the year, up from 63.5 percent in the same period of 2017.

What is noteworthy is that the ratio of side job activities among the elderly and young people with low employment stability has increased significantly.

Based on the average of the first three quarters over the past five years, the number of side-gig workers in their 20s and 30s increased by 37.2 percent from 78,000 in 2017 to 107,000 this year. The number of such workers in their 60s increased by 69.7 percent from 76,000 to 129,000.

During the same period, the number of dual-employment workers in their 40s and 50s increased only by 1.4 percent from 216,000 to 219,000.

By industry, the proportion of side job workers in health and social welfare services has increased significantly over the past five years.