According to the fact-finding report unveiled by the Korean Health and Medical Workers' Union(KHMU) and the survey on the economically active population by the Statistics Korea, while the average weekly working hours of the total employees in Korea decreased from 45.1 hours in 2010 to 43.6 hours in 2015, the working hours of health and medical workers increased from 46.4 hours to 49.8 hours in the same period.

This year, the average weekly working hours is 47 hours, for the survey that 28,713 health and medical workers responded to during the period of March to April this year.

72.6% of the respondents replied that they worked overtime, but 29.3% received the partial over-time pay and 56.2% did not get paid at all. Day shift workers work 9.8 hours a day, evening shift workers with 9.1 hours and night shift workers with 10.9 hours.

Regarding the use of maternity leave, 24.5% of the respondents said that they did not use the leave, citing the reasons that they did not want to give the extra workload to co-workers(21.1%), they were in fear of the personnel disadvantage and relocation(18.7%) and the maternity leave was not introduced at the time of the leave application(21.9%).

reported by Lee Eun-young
translated by Kim Sung-jin