Acting President Goh Places “Top Priority on Job Creation”

Acting President Goh Kun held the first meeting of the “Job Creation Committee,” which is comprised of labor, management, and government, at the Central Government Complex in Seoul on March 26, and said, “The government will place top priority to the creation of employment.”

In a meeting this day, Acting President Goh told Kang Shin-ho, the president of the Federation of Korea Industries (FKI) that “the unemployment of the youths is increasingly worsening since they avoid applying for the small and medium enterprises,” and requested that “the big conglomerates should employ the workers of the small and medium enterprises of the same industry so that the young people could reduce their preference for the big corporations.”

Labor Minister Kim Dae-hwan reported that he would apply himself to “the filling of the vacant jobs in small and medium businesses,” explaining that “university graduates can apply for at least 50,000 jobs among 140,000 vacant jobs in small and medium businesses in spite of the hardship of employment.”

In addition, in order to help secure the working power of young people through the improvement of the working conditions, Minister Kim also reported that he would supply small and medium businesses with supporting funds for improving the employment circumstances, and examine to introduce the employment bounty system which supports a certain amount of money (for instance, 500,000 to 600,000 won each month) to the companies recruiting unemployed young people for a certain period.

However, an officer in the Prime Minister Office said, “Application qualification for the employment bounty, the scale of the company support funds, the total budget required, and the date to start this system are under examination by the Labor Ministry, and they were not reported today.”

Seung-Ryun Kim srkim@donga.com