korea went from a flattened peninsula to a world top10 GDP in about 30 years. no shit their work culture is insane. add that to the fact that politically it was part of the same cold war american network as pro-capitalist dictators in south america, and, duh, worker’s rights haven’t exactly been high on the agenda either.
it’s been well known since like the 1980s that working in japan or korea is insane by western standards. very few non-koreans actually do that, though. the job market is very competitive here and you’d need native proficiency in korean to compete with the locals. add that to the fact their average income is below western levels ... you’d need some idiosyncratic reasons indeed to opt to relocate your life to korea in order to work harder, earn much less, and speak a difficult extra language.
but what exactly is the point of your observation? a democracy that’s younger than your parents’ age isn’t as comfortable as working in the very best examples of european democracies? erm ok? i’m not even working for a korean corporation. there’s a lot more to do and discover about a country than its work culture, you know. ‘everything about korea sucks’, lol wow. the high-speed collision of capitalism with ancient asian cultures is kind of the whole attraction of the region, isn’t it? which is why it’s so fucking funny that dilbert keeps making them out to be untouched, pure hermit kingdoms with no westernisation.
there are sweet deals to be had here if you can parachute in to work in the media, or a university, or, say, semiconductor research for samsung, and so on. if you’re an MIT graduate or an east asian studies professor or something then you’ll receive all the good bits of their status and hierarchy-oriented values and will skip the bad bits. but that goes for any highly qualified worker who wants to move around internationally: you get the chef’s selection. western people who relocate to dubai or singapore generally don’t expect to be treated like the underclass of construction workers. the major chaebols are barely relevant to westerners as they are so uniquely a product of korean values, including the fact they are still ran like family businesses. it’s not surprising to anyone to say those jobs aren’t very appealing to a non-korean.
as for describing all the hedonism and excesses of their nightlife: i mean you could describe the social rituals and routines of life in berlin and form some pretty rash generalisations too. the fact koreans binge drink and party hard is nothing compared to the lifestyles lived in berlin, or amsterdam/barcelona/london/new york, etc. of course you can read the worst into ‘people go on drug binges for 30 hours and often join one another for semi-anonymous sex in dark rooms’, aka an average weekend in kreuzberg. i’m sure a chinese version of larssen sat in qingdao would read that and conclude ‘everything about the west sucks’. i was deliberately trying to paint a seedy picture to contradict dilbert’s ridiculous, paper-thin grasp of the place as some ‘pure ethnostate’ where nobody has fun and everybody has the exact same values.
Last edited by uziq (2021-05-17 14:41:05)
