[The Fountain] Courage to take vacation

If you can really take a one-month vacation, why would people oppose the 69-hour work system?

YOON SUNG-MINThe author is the political news editor of the JoongAng Ilbo. There seem to be people “selling generations” in the United Kingdom. In his 2013 paper “Thinking Generations,” Jonathan White, a political science professor at the London School of Economics, pointed out that left- and right-wing political groups use the concept of generation as a tool to create their grand political narratives.

He claimed that the right wing uses the generation as a means to justify welfare cuts, while the left wing uses it as a language to encourage social resistance in Britain.

Korean politics have also drawn up generational theories — such as “the 880,000-won generation” and “the generation who gave up three things” — to argue against generational inequality or for half-priced tuition.

While young people sarcastically say that politicians are “selling youth,” the young generation theory has recently grown by itself to the “MZ generation” theory. Gen MZ refers to both 1980-95 millennials and 1996-2010 Gen Zers.

If you make a list of “selling youth,” the latest entry would be the remark by Minister of Employment and Labor Lee Jung-sik. On March 6, Lee announced a working hour reform plan that allows up to 69 hours of work per week and said, “Gen MZ nowadays has a very good sense of rights and even demands the vice chairman or chairman of their company to come out and tell the basis for their bonuses.”

The minister argued that as Gen MZ has a high sense of rights, they will take advantage of compensatory leave benefits — such as “living away from home for a month” — due to working overtime. Lee may have thought that some SK Innovation employees sent a direct message on Instagram to SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, complaining about the gap in performance-based bonuses among several subsidiaries of SK Innovation.

But in Korean companies, it is a big challenge to tell your boss that you are taking a vacation longer than a week. If a generational theory ignores empirical evidence, it is not an argument but nonsense. “I don’t think there has ever been a generation that expresses their complaints openly and without hesitation like college students do these days.”

Is that a comment about Gen MZ? This is from an article published in a monthly magazine in 1979, when Lee was a high school student. If that generation had advocated for the right to take vacation “openly and without hesitation,” corporate culture would be quite different now. For several decades, people didn’t change. Only the immediate reality changes.

When asked for the plan in case a company does not allow employees to use up compensatory leave, Minister Lee’s response should have been about strict laws and systems that can change the reality, not Gen MZ’s sense of rights. If you can really take a one-month vacation, why would people oppose the 69-hour work system?