November 25, 2024

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Job seekers participate in a job fair held at the Bexco convention center in Busan on Wednesday. (Yonhap)

The number of newly hired workers in their teens and 20s marked the lowest figure since an official tally has been kept since 2018, a government data showed Sunday.

A total of 1.45 million new hires among people under the age of 30 occurred in the second quarter of this year, down 8.6 percent from 1.59 million in the same quarter in last year, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service data by the Statistics Korea. The number of existing jobs held by the same worker for Q2 marked 1.6 million, up 3,000 from the same period in 2023.

The decrease in new jobs for the 15-29 group -- youngest group in the working population -- was substantial even considering the continued decline in the country's youth population. There were 8.17 million South Koreans aged 15-19 in Q2 -- a 2.9 percent decrease from the year before -- which means the new jobs for young people was shrinking at an even faster pace than the youth population decline.

The official number of jobs is higher than the number of workers, as the former includes all jobs held by a single person. So if a one person is working two jobs, it would count as one in the workers' tally but as two in the jobs tally.

A Statistics Korea report released last week showed that there were 20.83 million jobs across the country in Q2, up 254,000 from the Q2 of 2023. The total number of jobs has been rising since 2017, but jobs held by under-30s and those in their 40s have decreased on-year -- by 48,000 among the latter group.

The overall number of jobs held by those in their 20s or younger marked 3.06 million in the second quarter, down 134,000 from the same period in 2023.

This was in contrast to the increasing number of jobs held by older workers, with jobs held by those in their 50s and aged 60-and-over increasing by 124,000 and 261,000, respectively, over the same period.

Jobs for those in their 30s increased by 59,000, but the number of new jobs for this age group was 1.07 million, down from 1.13 million the previous year.

A number of reports have indicated that young South Koreans are having difficulty looking for work. An October report by the Statistics Korea showed that of the 90,858 people who had been unemployed for at least six months this year, 55.7 percent of them were in under-30.

The youth unemployment problem is potentially more serious than the stats suggest, since economically inactive people -- referring to those who do not actively try to get a job -- are not included in the aforementioned unemployment figure. Another report by the same agency in September showed that 82,000 people in the 15-29 group did not even try to get jobs between January of August of this year, after finishing their education.

By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)