Korea's 52-Hour Workweek Cap

If you use your phone nonstop, day and night, the battery wears out and the device breaks down. People are the same. Work without rest, and body and mind give out. So the law draws a safety line you must never cross on how many hours a person can work in one week.

The baseline is the statutory working time (the standard number of hours set by law): 40 hours a week. Work 8 hours a day for 5 days and you hit exactly 40. But businesses have busy days, so if the employer and the worker agree, up to 12 more hours of overtime are allowed each week.

Add the 40 regular hours and the 12 overtime hours, and you get 52. In other words, making someone work more than 52 hours in a single week is strictly prohibited by law, even when work piles up. There are exceptions. Workplaces with fewer than 5 regular employees, certain special-case industries such as transportation and healthcare, and some workers who aren't covered by working-hour rules (such as monitoring jobs or managerial and supervisory roles) are exempt. Also, in special situations like disaster recovery or a sudden surge in work, employees can work extra hours with approval from Korea's Ministry of Employment and Labor and the worker's consent.

Believe it or not, the basic working hours (40) and the overtime limit (12) were the same back then too. Yet many companies had people working 68 hours a week, weekends included. The reason was a loophole in how the law was read.

In the past, "one week" was interpreted narrowly as just the five weekdays (Monday to Friday). So after 40 regular hours plus 12 overtime hours on weekdays, work on Saturday and Sunday was treated as separate "holiday work." That allowed 8 more hours each day, 16 in total.

So 40 plus 12 plus 16 made 68 hours of work possible. Then the law was amended to state clearly that "one week means all 7 days, holidays included." Now, whether it's weeknight overtime or weekend shifts, all overtime across the 7 days is added together and capped at 12 hours.

Not every industry runs at the same pace every week. Some fields, like a game studio right before a launch or an air conditioner maker in peak season, get slammed at certain times. Telling them to hold to 52 hours every single week could make it hard to keep the business running.

So the law provides exceptions such as the flexible working hours system (similar to averaging hours over a period). In busy weeks, regular hours can go above 40, and in slower weeks they are cut back, so that the average over a set period (up to 6 months) comes out to 40 hours a week. That means that in a busy week, once overtime is added, a person may even work more than 52 hours.

As the system took root, more people got to enjoy evenings of their own. But new problems appeared. Workers who relied on overtime pay saw their paychecks shrink, and small businesses struggled because they couldn't easily hire extra hands. Finding the balance between workers' health and company productivity is still an ongoing process.