"This Chuseok Holiday, 8 out of 10 Companies Have a '4-Day' Break"

KCCI Announces Related Survey Results
95.2% Say "Implement Chuseok Holiday Leave"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kiho Sung] It was found that 80.4% of companies implementing holidays during this Chuseok holiday period are taking a 4-day break. Among the responding companies, 95.2% answered that they will observe holidays during this year’s Chuseok holiday.

The Korea Employers Federation (KEF) announced on the 4th that these results were revealed from the '2022 Chuseok Holiday Leave Survey' conducted on 794 companies nationwide with five or more employees (based on responding companies).

This year, Chuseok includes substitute holidays, making the public holidays 4 days long (September 9?12). Accordingly, the highest response rate was for companies taking ‘4 days’ off at 80.4%, followed by ‘5 days or more’ at 8.6%, and ‘3 days’ at 7.0%.

Companies taking ‘3 days or less’ off accounted for 11.0%, with the most common reason being ‘workload is not heavy, but work is unavoidable due to meeting deadlines, etc.’ (45.3%).

The proportion of companies planning to pay Chuseok bonuses was 65.1%, almost the same as last year (65.0%). Among them, 92.6% responded that they would pay ‘at the same level as last year,’ followed by 5.0% who would pay ‘more than last year,’ and 2.4% who would pay ‘less than last year.’

In a survey on the payment methods among companies paying Chuseok bonuses, the most common method was ‘paid as regular bonuses’ (61.9%), followed by ‘separate bonus payment’ (34.7%), and ‘both regular and separate bonuses simultaneously’ (3.4%). Among companies paying Chuseok bonuses, the proportion of companies paying fixed bonuses (regular bonuses) was higher in companies with 300 or more employees at 85.5% (77.4% + 8.1%) compared to 62.4% (59.7% + 2.7%) in companies with fewer than 300 employees.

Among responding companies, 45.6% answered that this year’s Chuseok business conditions are ‘similar to last year.’ However, only 9.8% responded that conditions have ‘improved,’ while 44.6% responded that conditions have ‘worsened.’

In a survey on how companies expect their annual business performance this year compared to last year, the highest response was 39.2% expecting it to be ‘similar to last year.’ However, 37.7% expect it to ‘worsen,’ while only 23.1% expect it to ‘improve.’

By company size, the response that business performance will ‘improve’ compared to last year was 26.7% for companies with 300 or more employees, 4.0 percentage points higher than 22.7% for companies with fewer than 300 employees. Conversely, the response that performance will ‘worsen’ was 38.3% for companies with fewer than 300 employees, 5.7 percentage points higher than 32.6% for companies with 300 or more employees.

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