Salaried workers take less than 8 days of annual leaves

Salaried workers take less than 8 days of annual leaves. July. 17, 2017 07:19. by Ae-Jin Ju, Hye-Ryung Choi jaj@donga.com,herstory@donga.com.

It is already mid-July, but Lee (31) has yet to set her summer vacation plan. She could not do it because her team leader has yet to disclose leave schedule. “Due to the mood in my office wherein workers set their vacation schedules in order of durations of service at the company, I cannot afford to choose my favorite schedule before them,” Lee said. “Many of the youngest employees in teams even miss the chance to take summer vacations while waiting for senior workers to fix their schedules.”

For this reason, salaried workers in Korea are only taking 7.9 days on average, or half of their annual leaves (15.1 days) per year, a survey has found. Like Lee, Korean salaried workers often cannot afford to take leaves because they are wary of seniors’ schedules or too busy to take leaves, the survey revealed.

These are some of the findings from a survey on ways to promote the use of leaves to galvanize domestic tourism and expected benefits from use of more leaves, which the Culture, Sports and Tourism Ministry and the Korea Tourism Organization released on Sunday. As for the reason for using only a portion of their annual leaves (multiple answers), those who picked "mood within their work" numbered the most, followed by those who selected "excessive workload or lack of backup manpower (43.1 percent)," and "to receive compensations for unused annual leaves (28.7 percent)."

An analysis on economic effect of employees’ use of their leaves suggests that if 14 million salaried workers in Korea use all of their annual leaves, consumption during vacations will increase by an estimated 16.8 trillion won (14.8 billion U.S. dollars) in total. The resulting expansion in direct and indirect production will amount to 29.36 trillion won (25.9 billion dollars), the analysis showed.