The government and ruling party have agreed to amend the law to have 90 days of maternity leave expenses paid for from "job insurance" as of next year. Currently the system only pays for 30 days off, leaving the remaining legal allowance of 60 days for employers to pay for, something that has contributed to the way companies avoid hiring women and women avoid having children. Also, women who have miscarriages or stillbirths will be guaranteed 45 days off with pay, with those funds also coming from "job insurance."
Desperate to do something about promoting the hiring of women and the increasingly lower birth rate, the government has finally come up with some new key measures. Childbirth and childcare need to be seen as the responsibility of the whole of society and not just that of individual women and families. Countries in Europe and other regions that experienced low birthrates earlier than Korea tried similar solutions.
The Korean corporate atmosphere is still such that working women who become pregnant are most often treated as if they have done something wrong. It is a shocking atmosphere, one in where women are forced to choose between their jobs and their children. The low birthrate is perhaps the natural result when most young women want both employment and self-realization. At the World Economic Forum (WEF) last year they announced figures about laws relating to job equality in 104 countries, and Korea placed 102nd. Assuring that working women can be mothers and bearing the social burden of that is something Korea, with one of the world's top ten economies, really should be doing.
Something else that makes work difficult for women is the question of who looks after their babies. Most working housewives have experienced the frustration of not being able to find adequate childcare facilities. The facilities that exist currently can only take in 30 percent of the country's children, and among those only 10 percent are national or another variety of public school. Of course the burden is nothing minor. There needs to be a quantitative and qualitative increase in childcare facilities and financial assistance to that end. Raising the next generation properly is the most important thing the country can do. We hope to see substantial follow-up measures.
The Hankyoreh, 22 April 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Increasing Access to Childcare |
