One-third of S. Korean youth happy with work, wage levels: report
Young South Koreans were relatively dissatisfied with their lives compared with their global peers, with only a third expressing contentment with their wages and working conditions, a report showed Tuesday, Yonhap reports.
According to the report by the Ministry of Data and Statistics, 36 percent of all waged workers aged between 19 and 34 said they were satisfied with their working conditions in 2023, while only 27.7 percent expressed satisfaction with their wage levels.
Respondents in their early thirties expressed the lowest satisfaction regarding wages, at 26.3 percent.
Such financial dissatisfaction appears to lead to psychological crises. The suicide rate among the age group last year was 24.4 per 100,000 people, up 1.3 from the previous year.
The survey, meanwhile, showed a grim outlook on how young Koreans view the possibility of social mobility.
In 2023, only 27.7 percent said they believed it was possible to climb up the social and economic ladder through personal efforts, with respondents becoming more pessimistic about improving their socio-economic status as they grew older.
The overall life satisfaction score for young South Koreans came to 6.5 points out of ten, putting the country in the 31st spot among 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
As of last year, there had been 10,404,000 people aged 19 to 34 in South Korea.
Their proportion to the entire population steadily declined from 28 percent in 2000 to 20.1 percent in 2024. However, the proportion of single households among them grew from 6.7 percent in 2000 to 25.8 percent in 2024.
Meanwhile, more young people remained single compared with 24 years ago.
The unmarried rate among men aged 30-34 was 74.7 percent last year, while the figure for women of the same age demographic was 58.7 percent.
The average age at which women gave birth to their first child was 33.1 last year, delayed by more than six months from the 2021 average of 32.6 years-old, which marked the highest among all OECD nations, according to the report.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported the number of newlyweds continues to fall in South Korea for the second consecutive year in 2024.
