주 52시간제로 초과근로 감소 계속… 음료 제조업 12.8시간↓

It looks like the 52-hour maximum workweek policy is working out well.
Latest figures show the policy has actually led to reduced overtime hours in small-and-mid-sized companies in Korea
Our Choi Si-young with details.
According to data released Wednesday by the Ministry of Employment and Labor,
the average overtime hours in May for workers at small and medium sized firms... with at least three hundred employees... have dropped by as much as thirteen hours compared to the same month last year.
Workers in the beverages industry saw the largest reduction in overtime hours,... working an average of 27.4 hours of overtime in May.
That's down by almost 13 hours from the previous year.
Employees in the food industry saw their overtime hours reduced by about 11 hours,... followed by the plastic and non-metal industries with reductions of roughly 10 hours.
Also in May, workers at those firms earned monthly wages of about 38-hundred U.S. dollars.
That's a jump of three-point-six percent from the same period in 2018.
The total number of workers also increased.
Small and medium-sized firms with at least 300 workers employed a total of three million people in June, a zero-point-eight percent increase compared to June last year.
The statistics come from a cohort of thirty-thousand firms asked by the labor ministry to submit the relevant data.
Choi Si-young, Arirang News.