What is the Maximum Overtime Hours allowed in Korea?

With the amendment of the Labor Standards Act on February 28, 2018. This post has been outdated. Check out the new post.

What is the maximum work hours including overtime that you can implement in your workplace in Korea? The answer is currently 68 hours and it is likely to change sooner or later.

Now, here is the explanation on how we get 68 hours.

Legal weekly work hours based on the Labor Standards Act (LSA) is 40 hours.

Article 50 of the LSA – (1) Working hours per week shall not exceed forty hours excluding recess hours.

The maximum overtime hours allowed by the law is 12 hours per week.

Article 53 of the LSA – (1) If the parties concerned reach agreement, the working hours stipulated in Article 50 may be extended up to twelve hours per week.

It would appear that the maximum weekly work hours based on the above mentioned articles should be 52 hours per week. However, the LSA has no specific article about whether work hours on Saturday and Sunday should be included in the maximum overtime of 12 hours stated above or not. What we currently have is only the guideline by the Ministry of Employment and Labor that says work hours on Saturday and Sunday are not included in the maximum 12 hours overtime.
That leads to the following calculation.

40 hours (workweek) + 12 hours (max. overtime) + 8 hours (Saturday) + 8 hours (Sunday) = 68 hours

*You should, of course, pay premium rates for overtime and holiday work.

This 68 hours has been the practice in businesses for a long time. However, a number of lawsuits lodged by labor unions claiming that 52 hours, not 68 hours, should be the maximum based on the strict interpretation of the law led to debates among labor, management and the government. Moreover, reduction of overtime hours to improve worker’s quality of life has been one of the agenda pushed by the new government.

Labor, management and government have been discussing how to settle the issue of overtime limit for several months, but have yet to reach a conclusion. The government and the ruling party is pushing for 60 hours as maximum work hour and labor unions and opposition parties are for 52 hours. Eventually, the law will be amended and more specific and detailed restriction on overtime will be enforced but it is hard to say when an agreement will be made because discussions over labor-related issues in Korea have a proven record of getting postponed or protracted forever.

There was an interesting coincidence. While I was preparing a post on this topic, I got a question on the same subject from someone who used the question form on the top of this blog. Thanks to him, I was able to write this post faster than usual. :-)