Why hundreds of thousands of young South Koreans are neither working nor studying
Government labour surveys in 2024 counted more than 400,000 young South Koreans who described themselves as simply resting — a group whose growth says as much about the structure of the job market as about the young people in it.
In Korea’s monthly labour statistics there is a category translated, a little starkly, as “resting” — people who are not working, not job hunting and not in school or training, and who give no particular reason such as childcare or illness. Among people in their twenties and early thirties, that group has grown large enough to become a fixture of policy debate: surveys through 2024 put it above 400,000, and the broader population of young people neither in employment nor in education or training is larger still.
The easy reading is generational — that young people have become choosier or less resilient. The evidence points somewhere else. Korea’s labour market is sharply divided between a primary tier of large firms and public-sector jobs, with high pay, strong protections and predictable careers, and a secondary tier of small enterprises and irregular contracts where pay is lower, tenure shorter and the ladder upward largely missing. Moving from the second tier to the first is rare enough that many graduates treat their first job as a decision that cannot be undone.
That structure changes the calculus of waiting. If accepting a small-firm job now makes a large-firm job less likely later — because hiring favours fresh graduates and screens on first employers — then spending another year preparing for public-service exams or big-company recruitment rounds can look rational, even at the cost of a blank line on a CV. “Resting” is often that preparation between formal attempts, or recovery from a string of them.
The phenomenon also has a regional geometry. Well-paid openings concentrate in the capital region, while much of the youth population that stays in provincial cities faces a thinner local market. For those unwilling or unable to move to Seoul’s housing costs, the choice can narrow to underemployment at home or an expensive bet on the capital.
Governments have responded with subsidised internships, employment-incentive payments for small firms, and outreach programmes aimed specifically at young people who have disengaged from the search. These help at the margins, but the underlying incentive — the outsized gap between the two tiers of the labour market — is a harder thing to legislate away. Labour economists in Korea have argued for years that narrowing that gap, through stronger protections and pay in the second tier rather than more screening for the first, is the durable fix.
The stakes extend beyond the individuals involved. A cohort that spends its twenties in a holding pattern accumulates less experience and less savings, marries later if at all, and enters its thirties with a weaker attachment to work — in an economy that, given its demographics, will soon need every young worker it can get.