Seven out of 10 South Korean workers who took on heavier workloads after colleagues went on maternity or parental leave, or shortened their hours to care for children, received no allowance or compensation for the extra work, a survey showed.
Gabjil 119, a labor rights group, commissioned pollster Global Research to survey 1,000 workers aged 19 and older nationwide from Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 on the burden placed on colleagues when parental protection programs are used. The findings were released on Oct. 14.
Asked whether their workload had increased because a colleague took maternity or parental leave or reduced working hours for childcare, 47.8% of all respondents said yes. That means roughly half of workers have absorbed additional duties when a co-worker went on leave or cut back hours.
Gabjil 119 said the result reflects how often companies distribute the resulting gaps among existing staff without hiring replacements or reorganizing work.
Among the 478 respondents who said they had covered a colleague's duties, only 29.5% said they had ever received an allowance or other compensation. The remaining 70.5% said they took on extra work without any additional pay.
Compensation varied by workplace size and employment conditions. Workers with relatively higher pay — including union members and those at companies with 30 or more employees — were more likely to have been compensated. At workplaces with fewer than 30 employees, only about two in 10 said they had received anything.
Awareness of government subsidies for sharing the workload was also limited. Only 37% said they knew of the parental leave workload-sharing subsidy. Awareness stood at 29.5% for the subsidy tied to reduced working hours for childcare and 29.7% for the spousal maternity leave sharing subsidy.
Actual use of the programs was lower still. Just 12.4% said their workplace actively informed staff about the subsidies and put them to use.
By contrast, 46.4% said the programs were explained but not used in practice, while 41.2% said they were neither explained nor used at all.
Awareness and actual use were lowest among workers at smaller companies and those who do not belong to a union, the survey found.
Asked what compensation they needed when covering for colleagues on leave, the largest share, 27.5%, called for creating or raising a substitute-work allowance. That was followed by expanded benefits such as higher year-end bonuses or extra points in performance reviews, at 24.8%, and time off proportional to the period of substitute work, including special leave, at 19.7%.
"The government should expand these programs and make them more effective by helping secure replacement workers and paying allowances to those who take over the work," an official at Gabjil 119 said. "It should actively inform workers and employers so that the programs are actually used."