Yoon Hee-sook's Pledge to Halve the Number of Children per Daycare Teacher

Yoon Hee-sook, member of the People Power Party./Photo by Yoon Dong-joo doso7@

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Cheol-eung] Yoon Hee-sook, a presidential candidate from the People Power Party, announced on the 16th a pledge to halve the number of children per daycare teacher.

Yoon said, "Although childcare infrastructure has rapidly expanded so far, problems such as poor-quality meals, child abuse, and safety accidents continue to occur. It is now time to drastically improve quality."

Currently, the standard is 3 children aged 0 per teacher and 20 children aged 4 per teacher, which is much higher than in other advanced countries, and there is also a large regional variation in the rate of exceeding these standards.

She also emphasized the importance of making parental leave pay more realistic and supporting substitute workers in companies to encourage small and medium-sized enterprise employees who are hesitant due to social pressure and fathers who cannot take parental leave due to income reduction concerns to use parental leave.

She pledged to expand parental leave pay to 90% of the ordinary wage with a monthly cap of 2 million won, and to provide 100% of the ordinary wage (monthly cap of 3 million won) for the first three months of fathers' parental leave. She also promised to extend paternity leave to 20 days.

In addition, she said she would allow tax credit benefits for the cost of care services for preschool children, introduce a wage disclosure system to resolve information asymmetry in the labor market, and eliminate unnecessary suspicions and workplace conflicts.

This includes requiring private companies to disclose wage levels by gender, employment type, occupation, position, job, education, and years of service.

She also proposed investing 200 billion won annually and 1 trillion won over the next five years in the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) infrastructure enhancement project.

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