A generation label, and a 2008 wage left in place

Woo Seok-hoon’s book, the report says, was written about the reality of Korea’s “880,000-won generation,” that is, people in their twenties and thirties. In the notes, that “2030” is a generation label, not the year 2030, and is read that way here. The book looks at the Korean economy as a problem between generations, and as a problem passed to the next generation.

At 2008 rates, a month’s pay at the then minimum hourly wage, for a forty-hour week, came to a little over 830,000 won. The notes add that the figure has since risen, but the 2008 number is left in 2008, and is not treated here as a later official total. The Non-regular Worker Protection Act, which came into force in 2006, did not, in the writer’s view, really protect non-regular workers, who, the writer claims, still suffer. That year stays in 2006. Young people who want work still cannot find it properly, the report says, and economic activity falls with that failure.

In an aging society, the younger generations may, in this telling, receive no pension when they themselves are old, and must still bear the cost of supporting the elderly and paying tax. They are, in a word, a generation caught between generations. The author argues that people now in their forties and fifties should admit that the society they lived in is not the one the younger live in now, and should take the seriousness of the younger problem as a social one.

Who does the hiring, and what the older cohort once could do

It is people in their forties and fifties, Woo claims, who push those in their twenties and thirties into endless competition. The reason given is that, when a firm hires, the people who do the hiring are all of that older cohort; the ages of those who take on the young are all of the older generation. Conflict between generations, the book says, then becomes economic conflict as well, and the book explains that in some detail.

In the past, the report says, that older cohort could boast of a grade-point average in the ones, refuse class together and join protests, and after graduation simply pick a large firm regardless of grades. At university they reacted so sharply to social problems, yet now, the writer says, they only make their own children roll along with society. Most of those who are the established, or who curry favour with the established in order to be well seen, are in their forties and fifties, and they are the ones pushing their children — people now in their twenties and thirties — into a system of endless competition, which then runs on into conflict between generations.

The problem arises, in this telling, because understanding between generations is thin. People in their forties and fifties think that in their time everything was easy, and that effort brought a just reward, so that today’s young fail to receive a reward because they do not try properly. But for today’s young, the writer says, even proper effort leaves no money to come back to them; the economy and the society are not those of the past. Even if they work themselves to death, the money that returns is less than a million won a month. That claim stays as the writer’s, and is not treated here as a later official total. The exploitation between generations continues, the book says, not because those in their twenties and thirties lack effort or ability, but because of a social structure made by the established among the older cohort, and it is that structure that gives rise to the troubles.

A critique: not only a conflict of generations

The student then turns to a critique and to what the book still suggests. The book, in fact, has a tendency to light and to show too much only the conflict between generations. People in their forties and fifties, too, can only move along a system that society has structurally made; to light this simply as a problem between generations is, the student thinks, to set a fire under conflict between generations. The responsibility of the firms and of the government that drove the matter as far as that conflict is large; to light it as a conflict of generations is, in this view, simply to make ordinary people fight one another.

That older cohort also suffer. After an early retirement they try one second business after another and fail; the employment rate does not rise, yet the age of honourable retirement grows gradually shorter. Those decisions, the writer says, are not made by people in their forties and fifties either, so there is a relatively serious problem in lighting the matter simply as a conflict of generations.

Even so, the author had a reason for naming it a problem between generations. As the summary already said, Korea’s cohort in their forties and fifties understand those in their twenties and thirties far too thinly. Young people now in their twenties, in this telling, are swept along in a social and economic system that the older cohort made in order to exploit and to keep their own places; from their teens they prepare a future and an entrance exam, and they spend their twenties preparing themselves to the bone for a large firm, exhausting their youth in order to meet the conditions the established want. So long as that understanding is not properly formed, people in their twenties and thirties, who stand in the weaker place in economic life, remain in a structure in which they can only be exploited by the older cohort. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student report on Woo Seok-hoon’s book about Korea’s 880,000-won generation, that is, people in their twenties and thirties, with “2030” read as a generation label, not as the year 2030.
2. A 2008 monthly pay of a little over 830,000 won at the then minimum wage for a forty-hour week, left in 2008, and a 2006 Non-regular Worker Protection Act, left in 2006, as the writer judges it.
3. The book’s claim that people in their forties and fifties push the young into endless competition, and the student’s critique that lighting the matter only as a conflict of generations sets ordinary people fighting.

Last updated: 14 November 2026