Quality jobs for retirees crucial as Korea quickly heads toward super-aged society
Shin Jung-rok, a retired mid-level official from a district office in Gyeonggi Province, recently left his last job as a security guard at an office building in Seoul.
He says he desperately needed a job after retirement because he found the severance pay he received to “not be sufficient” to survive.
“However, being a security guard was not my choice. Instead, it was the only option that I was left with,” he said, adding no employers were interested in capitalizing on his “decades of expertise in the civil service.”
“And for people like me, who mostly worked in an office, a job as a security guard was a lot to take on as it is physical demanding by my standard. It was too much for me to carry out the tasks required,” he 토토 added.
Shin is among the increasing number of retirees in their 60s or older, who are forced to continue work after retirement as they have insufficient money to survive in Korea where life expectancy is the OECD’s third highest at 83.53 years.
They want to make use of their career experiences in their post-retirement job but can’t do so, because many employers deem that they are not as productive as younger employees.
As a result, they are mostly left with unwanted manual labor jobs, which therefore fail to motivate them. This impacts productivity and affects their ability to contribute to the economy in a personally meaningful way.