Labor ministry-backed panel touts shorter weeks at two Busan firms

The labor ministry's push to shorten Korea's working hours brought its advisory committee to Busan on Wednesday, where two small companies said they trimmed schedules without cutting pay by changing how work gets done.

The third meeting of the operating committee for the "Work-Life Balance + 4.5" project, run by the Korea Labor and Business Development Foundation, was held at Youngchang Echo in Sasang District, the ministry said. The project supports companies that reduce actual working time, including through a 4.5-day week, under agreements with labor and management that avoid wage cuts. About 347 workplaces have joined in 2026.

The Busan visits were meant to showcase cases the committee considers successful, and to discuss how to spread the approach to other regions and industries.

Youngchang Echo, a 31-employee manufacturer that supplies shoe insoles to global sports brands, cut average weekly working hours by two hours for all staff by designating the third Friday of each month as a paid day off. The company joined the project to curb repeated long hours during peak seasons and to retain skilled workers. It also introduced enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution systems, and says the time needed to make 10,000 pairs of insoles fell 8 percent, from 50 hours to 46.

D&I, a 58-employee IT infrastructure maintenance firm in Haeundae District, adopted a 35-hour week, shortening each workday by an hour and extending the lunch break by 15 minutes. It joined the project to attract young talent after frequent overtime and holiday work drove out core staff. It added three new employees to spread the workload, and the time spent preparing monthly reports and supporting documents fell from eight hours to two hours per case, the ministry said.

In a discussion after the presentations, participants traded questions on the trial and error, difficulties and responses involved in raising productivity on the ground. They agreed that productivity gains are a precondition for sustaining shorter hours.

"The two Busan cases show that changes in how we work and technological innovation can raise both corporate productivity and workers' quality of life," said Park Jong-pil, secretary general of the Korea Labor and Business Development Foundation. He said the foundation would work to spread the cases so that many companies join the shorter-hours effort.