South Korea To Shut Off Computers Past 19:00 Hours To Stop People Working Late (bbc.com) 106
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: The government in South Korea's capital is introducing a new initiative to force its employees to leave work on time -- by powering down all their computers at 20:00 on Fridays. It says it is trying to stop a "culture of working overtime." South Korea has some of the longest working hours in the world. Government employees there work an average of 2,739 hours a year -- about 1,000 hours more than workers in other developed countries. The shutdown initiative in the Seoul Metropolitan Government is set to roll out across three phases over the next three months. The program will begin on March 30, with all computers switched off by 20:00. The second phase starts in April, with employees having their computers turned off by 19:30 on the second and fourth Friday that month. From May on, the program will be in full-swing, with computers shut off by 19:00 every Friday. According to a SMG statement, all employees will be subjected to the shutdown, though exemptions may be provided in special circumstances. However, not every government worker seems to be on-board -- according to the SMG, 67.1% of government workers have asked to be exempt from the forced lights-out. Earlier this month, South Korea's national assembly passed a law to cut down the maximum weekly working hours to 52, down from 68.'
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Seems to be only Fridays to stop people working on weekends, winding down from 20:00 to 19:00 over a few months. The TFA doesn't contain much more than TFS. I thought a 50 hour week was bad (for Aussie standards), I guess I'm not too bad off!
If a government steps in to say your working too hard there is likely to be an ulterior motive. What could it be?
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If a government steps in to say your working too hard there is likely to be an ulterior motive. What could it be?
Government wants to lighten the workload to increase labor requirements so more africans can be imported to do "the jobs koreans won't do."
Re:wtf, /. (Score:5, Insightful)
If a government steps in to say your working too hard there is likely to be an ulterior motive. What could it be?
Reducing burn out and ill-health among its workers, reducing errors and replacement issues are likely reasons,
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People dying or getting seriously ill tend to place a burden on the state.
Of course it's unlikely that some politician actually cares about the health of the people they represent, and is trying to protect them from employers creating a culture of massive overtime.
Re:wtf, /-- ulterior motive (Score:1)
The government has this nefarious scheme of abolishing Daylight Savings Time, starting with the South, to show the mighty dictator up north Kim Jong Whats-his-face that superior firepower or not, nobody but Seoul's government can show everyone when the weekend actually starts.
Robots will be coming in, not to replace these workers; but they will roll into the workers' production floors and cubicle farms, little roombas to huge Hoover Big Suckas gathering their coordinates and creating schematics for the ulti
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52 hours a week? (Score:5, Funny)
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Pffft, I've worked over 200 hours in one week even though there's only 168 hours in a week.
You worked for AOL too?
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You could at least put in a link so the youngins know what you are on about.
https://youtu.be/tM0sTNtWDiI [youtu.be]
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That explains why you fell down at my door.
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Re:52 hours a week? (Score:4, Insightful)
You Americans never really did get over that whole slavery "thing", did you ?
Now you pay the slaves *just enough* to keep them alive and coming back in, day after day.............
Well played sir, well played.
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Interviewed at three places in South Lake Union, home of Amazon and just north of downtown Seattle, recently and two of the places had air mattresses. The other mentioned the building had showers so you didn't have to go home. About ten years ago buildings started adding showers for people that bike to work. Now, things have changed. I noped out of all three of those interviews.
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You mean that you're in the office 110 hours a week.
You're productively working for about 35 of those. The remaining 75 hours you're either fixing the mistakes you made by being too tired to work productively, slacking off on FaceTwit or making Monty Python references with your co-workers (or, possibly, ork references with your fellow cow-orkers).
Or - posting on Slashdot.
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What slackers. In Seattle we work 110 hours a week.
Well, that’s because you only have a dialup Internet connection - it takes you much longer to do the same amount of work as a Silicon Valley employee earning $50,000 a year.
Re:52 hours a week? (Score:5, Funny)
What slackers. In Seattle we work 110 hours a week.
MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
TJ: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'
MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
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Bad Data (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us work better on other schedules. Mandating things like this is a bad idea based on bad data from baaad sheep.
Re:Bad Data (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some of us work better on other schedules.
8pm on a Friday night for a normal government office worker is not an "other schedule".
It's "avoiding your wife".
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Is Korea like Japan? (Score:2)
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and in 2020 if they get rid of last train then the (Score:2)
and in 2020 if they get rid of last train then there will be no hard cut off time
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This is true in my experience in the U.S. too. There are vast differences in productivity levels between different people and times of the day, and most of the ones "working" the long hours are inefficient or faking it. There are "crunch" times on occasion, but even with those, the averages just need not be over 40 hours per week for people who make effective use of their time.
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My guess...... (Score:1)
Reduce overtime payments (Score:2)
Maybe the government wants to reduce overtime payments by getting employees to leave early. Then they reduce the government budget. Or perhaps get departments to expand. Cutting down on salaries like that would encourage workers to seek other ways of getting a pay rise.
Meanwhile, in North Korea... (Score:1)
Whippings have been ordered stopped between 2000 and 2300 on Sundays, to give the guards' arms some rest.
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Somebody's Math Is Off (Score:2)
So 2700 hours is 1000 more than "other developed countries"? Let's see; a standard 40-hour workweek times 50 weeks a year is 2,000 hours (less, if you get more than 2 weeks vacation, and a lot of people do...) So either somebody can't do math, or a lot of other "developed" countries are working a lot less than we Americans do.
Re:Somebody's Math Is Off (Score:5, Insightful)
Standard working week in Australia is 38hrs and 4 weeks leave. So 1824hrs. Add onto that public holidays (12) and you are getting close.
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And a lot of places have 35-hour workweeks, especially in government. So that brings it down even more.
35 hour workweek is 7 hours a day. 37.5 hour workweek is 7.5 hours a day, for those wondering.
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365 days - week ends (104) - public holidays (15) - holidays (20) = 226 days
and 2739 / 226 = 12 hours work a day!
Re:Somebody's Math Is Off (Score:5, Informative)
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I wouldn't be keen to work in the USA unless I could negotiate no more than 40 hours a week and 6 weeks of holiday, and sick time when I am ill.
How well is that working for Greece these days, by the way?
It works great for Switzerland, one of the richest [wikipedia.org] countries in the world.
GDP per capita in Switzerland: $80,837. In the US: $59,495.
Speaking of Greece, it is number 3 [wikipedia.org] in the OECD by total hours worked per year per worker (behind Mexico and South Korea).
Hours worked per year in Greece: 2035. In the US: 1783. In aforementioned Switzerland: 1590.
Hours worked per year/week and vacation weeks per year have very little to do with a country's wealth, economic output, or productivity. Greece's economy did not coll
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So they can all be seen working expected hours on a complex task.
The job done on time to a set standard.
The US has complex laws about who to hire and who has to stay working full time once hired.
Work in the US becomes more of a workshop with a few amazing people working really hard.
Random other people just stay at work so the database tracking over time will not flag any changes to work patterns.
When the job is done by a few skilled workers ever
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Rather tough (Score:2)
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Downtime (Score:2)
So if something crashes at 16:00 (when people are still at the office), but isn't fixed by 19:00, it stays broken until the morning?
I guess that may be why 67.1% have "asked" to be exempt.
In Korea after 7PM, (Score:2)
Email is Only for Old People (who have already retired, and can use the internet at home).
Or hire more people... (Score:2)
From the Culture with 2am Cram Schools (Score:2)
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But productivity is so low (Score:2)
Some one would spend some 50 or 60 hours working on setting up a simulation and they will ask for help because the answers are wrong. Our tech support would find they have worked on completely irrelevant portions of the models, and missed big important settings. They read our manuals in English, use an English-Korean dictionary, misunderstand a few terms, and waste all the effort. Simple things like missing the line that says, "..
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It is truly mind boggling, they turn out fantastic products, but how they manage to do it with this level of inefficiency I am not able to explain at all. I am missing something, Dont know what.
They manage it by doing insane hours. Similar to Japan...with all the stuff about just-in-time production, kaizen and the like, my impression is that Japanese companies and workers (on an individual level) - especially white collar office workers - are not really that efficient. They are perfectionists, have a strict hierarchy and low tolerance of error, work under huge stress, and put in a ridiculous amount of effort to get things done. So the end product is great...but the process to getting there is bad
hours (Score:1)