Times Insider explains who we’re and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes collectively.
I spent a lot of my childhood in the US and Canada however have lived in South Korea for all of my grownup life. I’ve observed one stark distinction between the locations I grew up in and South Korea: individuals’s perspective towards work. In North America, it appears to me that individuals search for jobs that they’re keen on or enthusiastic about. In South Korea, individuals typically prioritize jobs that supply status and higher reputations.
As a reporter protecting South Korea from the Seoul bureau of The New York Instances, I’ve written in regards to the nation’s cutthroat education system. It might come as no shock that South Korea’s work tradition can be rigorous. There’s a lot of data to show this, and greater than sufficient anecdotes about staff working extraordinarily lengthy hours. However to have the nation’s largest firms go on the document about implementing longer working hours for managers — a response to a downturn in enterprise — is one other factor altogether.
The information about longer hours appeared on my radar within the spring. Via on-line boards, and later from the native information, I realized that some influential South Korean firms have been advocating longer hours, and in some instances, even encouraging managers to return to the workplace six days per week.
Wealthy Barbieri, the deputy enterprise editor in Seoul, approached me about taking up the story. The information might function a peg and hook right into a deep-dive enterprise on South Korea’s present and former labor legal guidelines. This looking-glass kind of article is my favourite to report and write. Telling a narrative with actual voices and experiences is how, I believe, we protect our humanity in our journalistic quest to document the current for posterity.
The primary process was to seek out firms that have been prepared to go on the document about asking managers to work longer hours. As many enterprise journalists know, it’s typically tough to breach the barrier of tight-lipped spokespeople. I spoke to a handful of them to substantiate the information. It took a number of tries: I had virtually a dozen cellphone calls with one firm earlier than getting something on the document. An organization that did agree to talk on the document talked about that certainly one of its divisions had executed poorly in latest months; executives and leaders throughout the firm have been anticipated to return to its rescue. (Translation: They might work longer hours.)
One other key aspect for my article can be to talk with somebody who had labored in South Korea earlier than and after 2004, when workweeks have been capped at 5 days. I needed to seek out somebody who might communicate in regards to the nation’s work tradition at a time when many individuals have been accustomed to working greater than 5 days per week.
