South Korean companies are offering workers $75,000 to have babies amid the country's desperate bid for more children
South Korean companies are offering workers $75,000 to have babies amid the country's desperate bid for more children
"South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children."
This seems fishy to me.
Why not develop tax incentives and subsidies for the parents directly, instead of giving companies another loophole?
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies. This is probably related to the fertility rate.
Small FYI: Those are named "Chaebol" in South Korea, if anyone want's to look further into this.
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies
As an American I can not relate to this at all since it so so fucking foreign
What?
And abandon their system of government, corporate feudalism?
TBH I knew it was going to be something like this from the headline alone. Plutocrats never roll out this kind of thing without it somehow ending up in the hands of people who need it the least. Just like the USA's Paycheck Protection Loans.
My sister lived in S Korea a few years ago, and keeps up on some stuff. She mentioned the feminist 4B movement. Quoting an article:
4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or “no”: The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a lifestyle, and many women I spoke to extend their boycott to nearly all the men in their lives, including distancing themselves from male friends.
So some of this might be the movement, which is against the patriarchal society Asian countries are famous for (and part of why so many weeb incels want Asian "submissive" wives). Has my respect too. Iirc some men have been violently attacking women over it, bur I can't find a link in the limited time I have atm.
Sooo... political lesbianism.
TIL I'm ALL 4B's.
$75,000 for ONE child seems almost reasonable. $22,400 is a fucking joke.
Even 75k seems small for one child. I would expect an amount enough to support a kid until they are 18.
Oh, I know. “Almost seems” is doing some heavy lifting in that statement.
You’re going to spend minimum $350,000 on that child.
But because my son got my German citizenship he get's nothing, even though both his parents pay huge amount of taxes. We even need to pay for the Kindergarten out of pocket, which just so became quite more expensive too.
But to be honest, I don't want him to grow up here in Korea with all the pressure and the bleak outlook into the future where one worker will need to pay for one retired person too, especially for all the retieries who didn't have children for whatever reason.
all the retieries who didn’t have children for whatever reason
Could be that the grind at work doesn't leave any space for having a familiy.
Sure, I said for whatever reason, valid reasons or invalid. That doesn't change that it will get worse for the next generation.
Your last sentence just put a different spin on the "it takes a village" quote that I constantly hear from parents.
It takes a village to raise a child. But it also takes a village to care for the elderly.
What happens when that village is no longer cooperating?
That’s why the Silent Generation created industrialized elder care. Nothing like a hospital setting to help with the old dementia.
Maybe not be so openly racist south Korea.
Everyone I know that's gone to work that has told me of the openly - although polite - racism that takes place there.
Wanna go this tat club with you south Korean friend? Oh sorry you can't because your not native.
Fall in love with a local? Hope you plan on moving outta the country because everyone will hate the both of you.
Nope. Did it to themselves.
Think I read somewhere they are the most pure race anywhere in the world.
Truly the master breed 🙏 \s
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that the most racist nations tend to be the ones with the least diversity.
You couldn't pay me a million to make another being have to live on this planet.
It probably takes a lot more than that to keep them alive long enough for society to crush any means their ancestors had of supporting themselves.
A million dollars buys so much booze and cannabis which makes things so much easier.
This is the part I can’t get with all the moral panic. What sort of horrible person are you that you want to force other people to live this way? Isn’t inaction and breaking the cycle of violence and pain a better idea?
I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It's a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.
Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don't. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you'd have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.
The world isn't perfect but it's better than it's ever been in most ways. Even if we don't survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I've already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It's all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it's really beautiful despite the miserable parts.
Nah easier to hate 49% of the human race. I mean just look at Christians they hate 68.8% of the world without even breaking a sweat.
If I were offered $75k to have 1 kid, I'd still have to turn it down.
Especially considering it takes far more money and time to raise one.
Well if you already have a few it could cover it. Economies of scale.
It's not enough, the math doesn't make sense. 18 years of foods, diapers, creches, outings, gifts, hobbies, clothes, housing and education? Just to produce a another slave for profit? Nope. Get kittens or puppies if you can afford them. If not, look at pics.
Stupid question, but why not just target more immigration? It's not like there aren't enough people in the world. Having babies first taxes the economy, then eventually helps it. Letting immigrants in now helps now. And they'll probably have babies.
The reason they don't do that is Racism. Almost every modern nation with population decline has racist anti-immigration policies.
Korea is absolutely not prepared for any kind of immigration. And they've been isolated for so long they really don't know hor to deal with people who aren't from their culture.
Bring Koreans to Mexico and South America!
They love anything Asian and we are totally unaware of anything related to historical disputes of all kinds. So we would probably grow really cool hybrids...Mexikoreans or Korexicans. I didn't know, but most Koreans I know are tall people. I always assumed all Asian people were short, but that is certainly not the case. So tall people in Mexico do get an advantage.
Amazing to see marxist theory in action like that. It's so on the nose too, if that was in a novel it would look rather shoehorned in.
I was like "(companies) paying parents to have children" belongs to a caricature of capitalism, but here we are. (My bad, it's companies paying parents to have children, and not some bigger entity, like the government. I already edited the previous sentence for clarity.)
If you don't mind me asking though, what "marxist theory in action" do you see in this article?
In this case that the cost of replacement of labor power factors in to the wage a company has to pay in order to maintain production.
The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If a machine costs him, for example, 1,000 shillings, and this machine is used up in 10 years, he adds 100 shillings annually to the price of the commodities, in order to be able after 10 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Wage_labour_and_capital
edit: replaced quote with an imo more fitting quote from the same book.
I'd be willing to migrate as a skilled worker to some first world country desperate for tax payers and people who aren't too socially repressed to have a family.
But... naaah, I'm a dirty foreigner. What do I know? I'm sure they'll figure it out.
Would you want to work in a country that is known to have such a shitty work life balance that people aren't having children because of it?
I wasn't even going to touch that. But yeah... Japan is kind of the same thing, I think China is going to start trying to get migrants desperately in the next couple of decades because of the one child policy working too well. But if they are kind of assholes about it, being racist and making life very hard to settle, what's the point then?
Idk about Korea but here it's mostly because you can't afford to. I could barely support myself and someone else (most of that cost would be rent which wouldnt even change, either) before bringing children (whole bunch of new costs) into the mix.
I work a skilled job with half a decade of experience, and am in the correct salary range for the area, as well.
Yeah. I'm being sarcastic but I know it's not that simple.
Finally somebody listened to me. JFC you have to pay people to have and raise kids, it's stupidly expensive.
Hey Canada. This is what people want if you want us to breed.
Why add the company middleman? Just pay the parents directly.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A South Korean firm is offering employees up to $75,000 to have children and help lift the country's ailing birth rate.
The announcement comes after Booyoung Group, a construction firm based in Seoul, earlier this month declared it would give a $75,000 per-child bonus to employees who have babies, CNN reported.
The company's employees have collectively had at least 70 children since 2021, so the firm is on the hook to disburse $5.25 million in cash to its workers, per CNN.
Like in China and Japan, South Korea's aging and increasingly imbalanced population means there could be a surge in retired older people who require medical care while the country's supply of younger workers dwindles.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.
In Seoul, municipal authorities are giving $750 every month to parents who have children until their babies turn one year old.
The original article contains 305 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Vouchers for babies lol
How are the social laws in Korea for this? Like parental leave, healthcare, government support for kindergarten and schools, housing?
I humbly offer my impregnation services to South Korean wamman.
I mean, some cash is nice but the reason people don’t have kids is
All that, but sure, those little green pieces of paper ought to do the trick.
Gen Y/Z: we require legitimate action on climate change, ecocide, housing security and affordability, wealth inequality, economic mobility, work/life balance, social welfare, education, healthcare, greedflation, monopolies!
Capitalism: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas... How about a pizza party?
75K is not nearly enough little papers to raise a child.