[Editorial] Jobs for the Working Class

The Uri Party always says it supports “politics for the working class.” Deputy Prime Minister Han Duck-soo always says, “Creating more jobs will be at the top of my list when deciding new policies.” However, the Uri Party and the deputy prime minister of economics do not seem to keep their promise. It seems that they don’t even know how the regular people are deprived of their occupations.

People who run businesses related to the housing market such as moving service centers, interior business, and sash window have to close down now. This is because the government has imposed both property tax and transaction tax to house traders, which resulted in giving a blow to the housing market. This year alone, as many as 210, or four percent, of the moving service centers had to shut down. Also, the interior business sector is suffering from low demand and has to get a waiting number ticket from the association to get a project. The situation of those people only shows a part of how the people are losing their jobs.

The withering housing market is bound to have a negative effect on the construction business. In the third week of May, only 647 cases of house trading were reported, which was up to 1,182 cases in the third week of March. It has become difficult for a house owner to move into a new house because people hesitate to make purchases. As a result, house owners can’t pay the balance. From January to April this year, only 61 percent of the new apartments in Incheon and Gyeonggi Province were filled. Therefore, construction companies are going through a financial crisis, which is causing them to cease building new houses. The construction bargain money was six trillion won nationwide in April, which is down by 18.5 percent compared to the same period last year.

Last year, there were 1.93 million people working in the construction business in June. But the number has dwindled to 1.88 million in April this year, which also equals 40 percent or 13,000 “social” jobs the government has promised to create by investing a whopping 300 billion won. There is no dispute about the fact that a temporary public job forcibly made by using taxpayers’ precious money cannot be better than a private job in the construction sector. It is quite doubtful whether Kim Geun-tae, chairman of the Uri Party, knows many Koreans had to give up their jobs because of the government’s unreasonable real estate policies. If he keeps saying, “I will do everything in politics for the people,” while sitting in his office and not knowing what is happening in the real world, he will only trigger the public’s anger.

As long as the anti-market economy policy mindset of the Roh administration and the deputy prime minister remains unchanged, it will also continue to be difficult to create jobs for the working class. The current administration should change its attitude and lower the taxes to encourage house trading while starting a policy to expand the supply. In this way, it will be able to stimulate the construction business and create hundreds of thousands of jobs. When one trillion won is invested in the semiconductor sector, a mere 4,469 jobs are created. But, if the same amount of money is invested in the construction sector, as many as 23,602 jobs are created, which is five times more that that of the semi-conductor sector.