[The Editors' Verdict] The Ideological Hammer Striking Only the Weakest Links

Kim Youngjun (49), who opened a barbecue restaurant of about 66 square meters in Mapo-gu, Seoul in 2018, recently had to let go of another employee. This was because his monthly sales, which had reached 80 to 90 million won in the early days of the business, have now shrunk to around 50 to 60 million won.

Other business owners whose stores are performing even worse might say that such sales are still decent. However, considering the limitations of the owner physically filling in and the fact that, in this line of business, the key is ultimately a “battle for labor,” it is barely enough to keep things afloat. According to Kim's calculations, the minimum sales needed to retain one employee with a monthly salary of around 3 to 3.5 million won is at least 8 to 10 million won. Factoring in additional burdens such as weekly holiday allowances and other circumstances, Kim estimated that the labor cost per employee has increased by about 300,000 to 500,000 won per month compared to the early days of the business.

What does this amount mean? With the added impact of rising raw material prices, Kim says that in months without holidays or long weekends, he is lucky to take home about 2 million won. If he cannot even maintain the current level of sales, he will have to let go of another person. If that happens, he cannot run the restaurant; and even if he manages to keep the doors open, his earnings would be meaningless, so the best option would be to close the business as soon as possible.

Therefore, those few hundred thousand won are not “just a few hundred thousand won”?they can determine whether a small business manages to stay afloat or whether even the few jobs created there disappear.

Those who are let go cannot simply be “cool” about it. In fact, there are not a few cases where workers wish to stay on for a lower wage, but in local commercial districts, it is not uncommon for businesses that ignore laws and regulations and hire people informally to be reported by competing stores. The slogan that every worker should be guaranteed at least that level of wage sounds admirable, but it is meaningless if it destroys the employment structure itself.

The various side effects and market psychology that accompany the current minimum wage regulations lead to much higher cost increases than the figure of “this year’s minimum wage” alone would suggest. Self-employed business owners like Kim are not complaining because they want to earn 10 million won a month but can only make 5 million won. The fact that a store that once seemed to have a steady stream of customers suddenly closes its doors is not unrelated to these hidden circumstances of the self-employed market, which are not visible from the outside. It is reasonable to believe that these factors are reflected to a significant extent in recent Statistics Korea data showing that the number of self-employed people in the restaurant industry has declined for four consecutive months, and the number of self-employed business owners with employees has also continued to decrease.

Policies such as the minimum wage, the 52-hour workweek, and the 4.5-day workweek?which became a hot topic during the presidential election?inevitably concentrate their impact on these weaker links by encouraging less work and higher pay. Even for small and medium-sized enterprises, if their scale is large enough, they are relatively or even completely free from these effects; this is the paradox and the other side of these systems.

Is it truly progressive for systems to single out and hit the smaller and weaker businesses and workplaces? Should those who run such businesses really be treated as capitalists who must bear the burden of “pulling the cart”?

In a highly advanced and diversified economic and social structure like Korea’s, the concept of uniformity and blanket application is generally ill-suited or even dangerous. Words that sound beautiful no matter who says them are like delicious food that is bad for your health. It is regrettable that our society, and the outdated ideological fault lines that encourage it, rarely allow for public debate by treating the realistic approach of differential application as a blunt destruction of the system or by labeling those who support it as pro-business and anti-labor.