Gwangju City Operates Program for Emotional Labor Workers in the Public Sector

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Seon-gang] Gwangju Metropolitan City announced on the 16th that it will operate mental health healing programs such as an ‘online mental health self-diagnosis test’ and ‘psychological counseling support’ to protect the rights of public sector emotional laborers suffering from emotional labor due to COVID-19 response and other factors.

Emotional laborers refer to people who perform work required by their job or organization to express specific emotions different from what they actually feel during labor processes such as customer service.

As the first step of the mental health healing program, Gwangju is conducting an ‘online mental health self-diagnosis test’ from the 11th to the 29th for employees belonging to the city hall, public enterprises, and some invested and funded institutions to check their mental health status.

Participants can check their mental health status through the ‘online mental health self-diagnosis’ by assessing ▲stress awareness scale ▲depression test ▲job stress factors ▲insomnia level, and can immediately view the results online.

If the test results diagnose participants as being in the risk or management group, support will be provided to receive face-to-face or non-face-to-face counseling through 15 specialized psychological counseling centers in the area.

In particular, for organizations where most members of the participating departments suffer from emotional labor, group counseling support and group healing programs such as yoga, meditation, and therapy treatment will be provided.

Gwangju expects that this program operation will help employees suffering from emotional labor to heal their mental wounds.

Lee Bo-geun, the city’s Labor Cooperation Officer, said, “The ‘mental health healing program’ was prepared to prevent psychological and emotional damage caused by emotional labor and to improve the health level of emotional laborers,” adding, “We will notify the relevant institutions of the organizational diagnosis results and recommend that they prepare improvement plans.”

Meanwhile, since June, Gwangju has been conducting a survey on the actual conditions of emotional labor in the private sector together with the Gwangju Labor Center, and plans to establish and implement a plan to improve the working environment of emotional laborers in the Gwangju area by reflecting the survey results in the future.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.