By Choi Sung-jin
Big businesses, including Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor, were high on the employment growth index list announced by the Ministry of Employment and Labor on Nov. 30.
But this has raised more than a few eyebrows here, especially among those who know large companies' ability to create jobs has been steadily declining in recent years. Some experts say this is a typical case of statistics disguising the reality.
Samsung Electronics' sales last year, for instance, totaled 138 trillion won ($119 billion), accounting for 3.9 percent of the total 3,571 trillion won in corporate turnover. Yet the number of its employees stood at 99,000, 0.5 percent of total wage earners. Hyundai Motor's sales were 1.2 percent of the total but its employees took up only 0.35 percent.
Dwindling job creation by large companies is closely related to high mechanization of their factories as well as relocation of manufacturing plants abroad. In a way, the "jobless growth" led by big companies reflects industry's upgrading to greater efficiency, business watchers say.
The solution lies in discovering new growth engines or revitalizing the existing ones through extensive research and development, but the businesses that represent corporate Korea appear unable and/or unwilling to do so.
Samsung Electronics, for instance, will reportedly buy back shares totaling 11.3 trillion won and retire them. Critics say the move may be a shareholder-friendly decision but cannot hide that the world's largest smartphone maker has yet to find better investment destinations. Hyundai Motor also spent more than 10 trillion won buying land in southern Seoul to build its new headquarters, almost five times more than its investment of 2.1 trillion won in a new plant in Chongqing, China. Other chaebol are bent on winning licenses to operate duty-free shops rather than venturing into new businesses, here or abroad.
Against this backdrop, the labor ministry is just twisting the arms of businesses to hire more to meet the employment rate goal of 70 percent as pledged by President Park Geun-hye. As the officials do not care about the "quality" of jobs created, businesses increase the number of interns and even "borrow" the number of workers hired from their suppliers, labor market watchers said.
Because of what government and business officials are doing, any real improvement in the job market here may yet be far off, they noted.