Kim Young-sik: "62% of 'Digital New Deal' Workers Earn Less Than 500,000 Won Monthly"

This Year, Crowdworker Employees Account for 40%

[Asia Economy Reporter Minyoung Cha] Among the crowd-sourcing workers under the 'Digital New Deal' policy aimed at creating public jobs, about 62% earned less than 500,000 KRW per month on average.

On the 24th, Kim Young-sik, a member of the People Power Party and the National Assembly's Science, Technology, Information and Broadcasting Communications Committee, announced that according to the analysis of the status and performance of Digital New Deal job projects such as the Digital Dam construction from September 2020 to August 2021, submitted by the Ministry of Science and ICT on the 13th, 62.4% of workers received less than 500,000 KRW monthly on average. The figures were 75% in 2020 and 49.7% in 2021, respectively.

Looking at the project results after the supplementary budget execution last year (September to December), direct employment (development, design, etc.) accounted for only 19% (7,487 out of 38,882), while the remaining 80% (31,395) were crowd-sourcing workers. The average monthly working hours of all crowd-sourcing participants were only 41 hours, and 75% of them earned less than 500,000 KRW.

In the case of this year (January to August), 65% (9,157 out of 14,198) participated in crowd-sourcing, and half (49.7%) of the crowd-sourcing participants earned less than 500,000 KRW monthly. Among them, 15.1% earned less than 100,000 KRW, and 34.6% earned between 100,000 KRW and 500,000 KRW.

The problem is that more than 700 billion KRW of tax money has been invested in the crowd-sourcing project. Since September last year, 702 billion KRW of tax funds have been injected into the project. In 2020, 331.5 billion KRW was invested, and in 2021, 370.5 billion KRW was invested. The Ministry of Science and ICT has classified projects such as AI training data construction and digital learning centers, which have been promoted since 2017, as job projects starting from last year's supplementary budget.

Since the classification of employed and unemployed persons began this year, about 40% of crowd-sourcing participants were found to be currently employed. This has drawn criticism for being far from the original intention of helping employment. However, there are limitations in that specialized fields requiring professional data interpretation skills, such as healthcare or autonomous driving, must be carried out by specialized companies.

Assemblyman Kim Young-sik pointed out, "The Moon Jae-in administration's job projects focused only on easy and low-quality public jobs, resulting in being obsessed with statistics and employment indicators," adding, "Public jobs are temporary jobs that disappear as soon as government support ends, so the quality of labor inevitably remains low."

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