泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Minimum wage & divide and rule

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]

 

Minimum wage & divide and rule

February. 12. 2018.

The minimum wage has been in the news a lot since the beginning of the year. Following the news articles, fewer people now have jobs, self-employed persons have suffered a considerable loss, and the foundation of smaller enterprises—that accounts for over 90% of employment in the market—is giving way due to the minimum wage increases. And they also say that convenience stores will continue to shut down and many people will lose their part-time jobs.

 

Frankly speaking, I just want to throw the mouse on my computer monitor while I'm reading those ridiculous articles which make me blow my top. In the case of South Korea, the average salary of regular workers is based on 22 days a month. Supposing that an employee works 9 hours a day, the numbers add up to 198 hours a month. The worker would receive 1,490,940 won a month based on 7,530 won: the raised minimum wage at the moment. Therefore, we can see that the negative articles say that about 1.5 million won is too high for working people who spend their considerable length of time at work. I believe that convenience stores would be mentioned most when it comes to the minimum wage. If a part-time employee at a 24-hour convenience store works 24/7, the store staff can work a total of 8,760 hours a year. The store worker will additionally receive 9.3 million won a year, reflecting 1,060 won—the recent increased hourly wage. For example, GS25, the convenience store chain in South Korea, has about 11,000 stores throughout the nation. So the second-most popular convenience store chain has to cover the additional 1 trillion won. The company's headquarters generated sales of 7.4 trillion won posting 270 billion won in net profit in fiscal 2016.

 

I get mad at the media that creates these part-time employees vs. convenience store owners sentiment aggravating their difficulties by harping on the minimum wage. Small and medium-sized businesses and self-employed people account for 90% of all private-sector employment, whereas conglomerates tend to save a few hundred billion won a year with fairly low employment rates. Samsung keeps on rolling getting its supplies from the cheap sources based on low-wage earners with annual sales and operating profits volume exceeding 200 trillion won and 30 trillion won, respectively, although the media criticizes the government's policy day after day saying that smaller enterprises will go bankrupt due to workers who get increased monthly salary from 1.3 million won to 1.5 million won. I've never seen an article that smaller businesses account for 90% of employment when the Press sides with major companies insisting that the government needs to focus on supporting them for job creation.

You may know "divide and conquer". The divide and conquer is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. Current social frictions between low-income earners and smaller enterprises are believed a prime example of the divide and conquer. Political wrangling to justify the income disparities between rich and poor or disgraceful attitude to pass the buck to the weak should be avoided.

 

The same is true of the gaming industry. A couple of high-class publishers are dominating the market making trillions of won's worth of sales and hundreds of billion's worth of net profit. Increased big publishers' dominance against small and medium-sized developers for their interests will shake the foundation of the industry in the long run. It's shameful for the strong blame the weak. I expect that not only Korea's economy but also the national gaming industry would grow with a symbiotic relationship between members.

 

 

※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.

(http://www.khgames.co.kr)

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui