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Elderly Taking Jobs Others Quit
By Kim Jong-yoon, Joongang Ilbo
South Korea
September 13, 2005
While a greater number of the unemployed are electing to take a break from job hunting, a growing number of older people are trying to reenter the workforce.
The National Statistical Office said the number of people not seeking work for reasons other than ill health or age reached a monthly average of 1.2 million in the first seven months of the year, an increase of 199,000 persons, or 19.6 percent, from the same period last year. The figure represents a surge of 332,000 persons, or 37.6 percent, from 2003.
Unemployed people not looking for jobs are categorized as "economically inactive," and are excluded from official unemployment statistics.
An official with the office said that people who are neither ill nor too old to work but who have no immediate plans to look for a job are included in the group labeled inactive.
The official added that as the economy continues to struggle, a growing number of people feel they are unlikely to get the job they want in the near future and have decided to stay out of the job market. Others who recently lost their jobs are just taking time off before looking for something else.
Meanwhile, among the economically inactive group, the seven-month average of those who said they stopped seeking work because of their age has dropped 2.8 percent to 1.5 million.
The official with the statistical body said an increasingly aging society forces comparatively old people without jobs, including some age 65 and over, to start looking for work.
In other data, the monthly average of unemployed people who remain economically inactive because of poor health increased 3 percent from 2004 to reach 478,000 in the first seven months of the year.
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