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Opinion A sickness benefit for all, leaving no one behind
Daseul Moon1,2,3,*orcid, Hongjo Choi1,2,4orcid
Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine [Epub ahead of print]
DOI: https://doi.org/10.35371/aoem.2025.37.e25
Published online: July 28, 2025

1People’s Health Institute, Seoul, Korea

2Collective Action for the Right to Sick Leave, Korea

3Busan Center for Infectious Disease Control & Prevention, Pusan University Hospital, Busan, Korea

4Division of Health Policy and Management, Korea University College of Health Science, Seoul, Korea

*Corresponding author: Daseul Moon Busan Center for Infectious Disease Control & Prevention, Pusan University Hospital, Building S, 179, Gudeok-ro, Seo-gu, Busan 49241, Korea E-mail: moon912390@gmail.com
• Received: April 28, 2025   • Revised: July 20, 2025   • Accepted: July 21, 2025

© 2025 Korean Society of Occupational & Environmental Medicine

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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  • South Korea’s pilot sickness benefit program, launched in 2022 across six regions and currently operating in 14 regions as of 2025, represents a critical juncture in the country’s social protection development. While ostensibly designed with inclusive eligibility criteria, the program reveals fundamental paradoxes that illuminate deeper structural inequalities within Korea's dualized labor market. This opinion piece examines how current design choices risk undermining universal health coverage goals by systematically excluding the most precarious workers. The program’s design features—including low replacement rates (60% of the minimum wage) and extended waiting periods—created perverse incentives where the most vulnerable workers accepted the least favorable conditions. This pattern exemplifies what Korpi and Palme termed the “paradox of redistribution,” where targeted approaches ultimately prove less effective than universal ones, with the second phase’s restriction to the bottom 50% income bracket threatening to exacerbate this paradox. Successful implementation will depend on integrating equity, people-centered design, and gender-transformative perspectives into every phase—design, operation, evaluation, and reform. In doing so, South Korea has the opportunity to offer a model of sickness protection that does not simply patch gaps, but actively reshapes the structures that produce health and economic inequalities in the first place.
  • Keywords: Sick Leave; Social justice; Public policy; Universal health insurance; Labor relations
In July 2022, South Korea launched the pilot sickness benefit program in six local governments—Bucheon, Pohang, Jongno, Cheonan, Changwon, and Suncheon. The aim was to provide income support for workers dealing with non-work-related illness or injury, enabling them to prioritize recovery without fear of financial hardship. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic had laid bare the urgent need for institutional mechanisms that allow people to stay home when ill or recovering from vaccination. While public awareness of the importance of rest grew significantly, it quickly became evident that no systemic support existed to guarantee this right.1 In response, the Moon Jae-in administration committed to introducing a national sickness benefit scheme, which commenced after approximately 18 months of policy preparation. The original plan proposed full implementation by July 2025, following a three-year pilot phase.2
However, the roadmap began to unravel. During the 2024 general election, political discourse shifted decisively toward slogans like “competitiveness for economic growth,” effectively sidelining any serious discussion of the right to paid sick leave. The government demonstrated no political will and circumvented any form of social dialogue, announcing that institutionalization of the program would only be “considered” by 2027, rather than implemented in 2025 as initially planned.3 Since then, both political and public attention to the issue has largely faded.
The political terrain changed dramatically after President Yoon’s abrupt declaration of martial law, his subsequent impeachment, and removal from office. With a new election now on the horizon, discussions about reviving the sickness benefit policy have reemerged. Two of candidates—Jae-myung Lee and Young-guk Kwon—pledged to introduce sickness benefits during their campaigns, and Jae-myung Lee’s election victory has brought the issue back into policy discussions. On the one hand, a 2025 survey on labor policy priorities conducted in the wake of the president’s ouster found that introducing sickness benefits ranked just below expanding occupational safety and health protections for structurally marginalized workers.4 In parallel, National Assembly member Hyang-yeop Kwon introduced the “Right to Sick Leave Act (Apeumyeon Swil Gwonri Beop)” which includes provisions for both sickness benefits and medical leave.5 Yet despite this renewed political momentum, the policy process remains technocratic and exclusionary—dominated by expert-driven deliberation behind closed doors, rather than democratic, worker-centered dialogue.
Academia and civil society voices have consistently pointed out that the institutional and political discussions on the sickness benefit system lack clarity regarding financing, delivery mechanisms, and adequacy of income replacement. Importantly, the government’s pilot program limited eligibility to the bottom 50% of income earners, leaving concerns about the scheme's universality unaddressed. We argue that these design choices risk undermining the original commitment to advancing universal health coverage (UHC). For sickness benefits to make a meaningful contribution to UHC, three key dimensions must be addressed: population coverage, service coverage, and financial protection.6 This article calls for renewed scrutiny of the first dimension—who is protected and, more crucially, who is excluded.
Before examining eligibility criteria for Korea’s sickness benefit scheme, we must first situate this policy within the broader architecture of the Korean welfare state. While the program ostensibly aims for UHC, its institutional design systematically excludes structurally marginalized groups—a pattern that pervades Korea’s entire social protection landscape. Access to social insurance remains fundamentally tethered to one’s position within the labor market, specifically to formal, standard employment relationships.7 Coverage hinges on the existence of a formal employment contract, which serves as the primary gateway to social protection entitlements. Consequently, workers engaged in precarious, irregular, or atypical forms of employment are systematically excluded from benefits available to those secured within Korea’s primary labor market. Without addressing these structural inequities, the sickness benefit system risks entrenching, rather than dismantling, existing patterns of exclusion.
Korea’s dualized labor market creates a correspondingly stratified social protection system that perpetuates, rather than ameliorates, the structural inequalities. The scale of this division is stark: as of August 2024, precarious employment encompasses 41.3% of Korea’s wage workforce—approximately 9.16 million out of 22.14 million workers.8 This precarious segment includes two key groups that occupy the institutional blind spots of Korea’s social protection system: workers in disguised employment relationships (2.9%), who function as employees but are formally classified as independent contractors, and those in indirect employment arrangements (5.7%), including subcontracted and temporary agency workers whose employment relationships are mediated through third parties.8
The inequalities in social insurance coverage starkly illustrate this institutional segregation, although recent policy efforts to extend coverage to precarious workers have yielded some measurable improvements in enrollment rates. While over 90% of full-time permanent employees enjoy comprehensive social protection—with enrollment rates of 92.3% in employment insurance, 95.0% in National Health Insurance as workplace subscribers, and 88.1% in the National Pension system—precarious workers face dramatically reduced access, with corresponding coverage rates of just 54.7%, 52.2%, and 37.5%, respectively.9 These figures reveal not merely a coverage gap, but a systematic architecture of exclusion that denies basic social protection to over four out of ten Korean workers.
Even after successful enrollment, challenges persist: job insecurity, low earnings, and difficulties in exercising rights continue to define their reality. These structural inequalities are perhaps most starkly reflected in wage differentials. The wage inequalities between regular and non-regular workers are equally pronounced. Non-regular employees earn on average only 66.4% of what their regular counterparts receive.10 When disaggregated by firm size, these inequalities reveal a multilayered hierarchy of economic marginalization. Using regular workers in large enterprises (300 or more employees) as the baseline for hourly wages as of June 2024, earnings cascade downward: non-regular workers in large firms earn 62.3%, regular workers in small and medium enterprises (fewer than 300 employees) earn 57.7%, while non-regular workers in small and medium enterprises face the steepest penalty—earning merely 41.5% of the baseline wage.11 This wage hierarchy becomes particularly consequential under Korea’s contributory social insurance model, where both premiums and benefits are income-linked. Such systematic wage inequalities translate directly into unequal access to social protection and inadequate benefit levels, creating a vicious cycle where those most vulnerable to economic insecurity receive the least institutional support.
Labor market dualism does not operate in isolation but intersects with gender to create compounding disadvantages that push women toward the most vulnerable segments of Korea’s stratified employment system.12,13 Women's vulnerability in both labor markets and social protection manifests from the very point of labor market entry. Even employment rates reveal gendered inequalities: while 76.8% of economically active men are employed as of 2024, the corresponding rate for women stands at merely 62.1%.14 For those women who have secure employment, structural disadvantages persist throughout their working lives. The precarity differential is particularly striking: whereas 33.5% of male workers are employed in non-regular positions, this figure rises to 50.5% for women—meaning that over half of all employed women work under precarious conditions.15 These employment patterns are further compounded by Korea’s exceptionally severe gender wage gap. At 29.3% in 2023, Korea’s gender wage differential not only exceeds the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 11.3% by more than double, but represents the highest level among all member countries—a distinction that underscores the systematic devaluation of women's labor within Korea's gendered economic hierarchy.16
The fundamental premise of sickness benefits system rests on a well-established principle: workers need to rest when ill without fearing for their economic survival.17 This requires both the right to time off (sick leave) and the right to income protection during illness-induced work incapacity. While sick leave guarantees job-protected absence from work, sickness benefits provide essential income replacement through social security systems. In Korea, however, neither right is statutorily guaranteed. Paid sick leave exists only through limited employment regulations or collective agreements rather than as a universal labor standard, while sickness benefits remain confined to pilot programs rather than forming part of the formal social protection architecture.
Poor health and poverty operate in a vicious cycle that systematically traps vulnerable workers and their families. As Fig. 1 illustrates, this relationship between poor health, work incapacity, financial strain, and impoverishment operates cyclically rather than linearly. Critically, the cycle can begin at any point—illness, sudden income loss, or care cost burdens can all serve as entry points into this “poverty-health trap.” Korean evidence demonstrates this pattern starkly: health shocks among middle-aged workers result in income losses of 23.6% in the first year and up to 42.4% in the second year, while simultaneously increasing out-of-pocket medical expenses for up to three years.18 These impacts stem from both direct costs (medical expenses and caregiving fees) and indirect costs—particularly income losses when patients or family caregivers cannot work.19
Without timely intervention, families resort to loans, downsizing, and depleting savings, ultimately becoming trapped in deepening vulnerability. This framework suggests reconceptualizing ‘contribution’ beyond monetary income to include social provisioning, recognizing that unpaid caregivers already contribute to society through their labor, warranting protection during their own health crises.20 The model identifies four strategic intervention points: paid sick leave (A) enables recovery before work capacity deteriorates; sickness benefits (B) provide income replacement during absence; direct medical cost-related interventions (C) such as reduced out-of-pocket payments reduce financial health shocks; and comprehensive anti-poverty and employment protection policies (D) prevent socioeconomic decline from triggering poor health.
In Korea, paid sick leave remains a privilege rather than a universal right. Only 7.3% of surveyed private firms provided paid sick leave as of 2018, with access heavily stratified by employment status: 54.4% of permanent employees versus merely 14.7% of precarious workers have any form of sick leave provision.21,22 The inequalities deepen further among day laborers (2.0%) and part-time workers (8.4%).22 Even where formal access exists, actual usability remains constrained by job insecurity and income pressures, forcing most workers to continue working when ill or resign altogether. As discussed, sickness benefit schemes remain absent from Korea's social protection landscape. While the National Health Insurance covers virtually the entire population except for the most impoverished 3%, out-of-pocket payments still account for approximately 30% of total healthcare expenditure. Anti-poverty protections operate under severely restrictive means-testing criteria, and welfare and social security policies are systematically designed to exclude precarious workers. Under these circumstances, the vicious cycle described above creates an even more entrenched trap.
The severity and trajectory of these health-poverty cycles do not merely vary by employment conditions but are also profoundly modified by intersecting factors such as gender—making thoughtful sickness benefit design not merely a technical challenge but a fundamental question of social equity. It is noteworthy that family caregivers may experience work capacity reduction and income loss even without personal illness, yet face similar financial vulnerabilities. Korea continues to operate under a familialist care regime, where caregiving and nursing responsibilities are primarily assigned to families rather than public institutions, with women bearing the disproportionate burden. This gendered division of care work perpetuates women's employment precariousness throughout their life course, as caregiving obligations drive repeated career interruptions beginning with the M-curve pattern and extending to eldercare and spousal care responsibilities later in life. When social protection systems remain anchored to formal employment status while public care infrastructure remains underdeveloped, women face compounded disadvantages that become trapped within overlapping poverty-health and care-precariousness cycles. Paradoxically, the most vulnerable women cannot afford career interruptions and must persist in precarious, low-wage employment while simultaneously managing care responsibilities, intensifying their exposure to both employment and health risks. Even when women enter the workforce as additional workers following family health crises and income shocks, restoring previous household income levels remains challenging. Designing sickness benefits therefore requires institutional innovation that not only prevents the reproduction of existing gender inequalities but transforms the system by recognizing care work as socially valuable labor deserving of protection.
Given Korea's dualized labor market structure, the design of any social protection program inevitably confronts the fundamental question of inclusion versus exclusion. Korea's first-phase sickness benefit pilot represented a notable departure from conventional eligibility rules by defining participants as “employed persons residing in the local area.”2 Unlike traditional systems that systematically exclude non-standard workers—the self-employed, freelancers, and platform workers—the pilot recognized diverse forms of labor market participation, including Employment Insurance subscribers, workers’ compensation recipients, and self-employed individuals with maintained business registrations.
Table 1 and Fig. 2 present a comprehensive overview of the first-phase pilot program, detailing the industrial composition, employment characteristics, and program design features across six regions, alongside key applicant demographics and benefit outcomes. Although official selection criteria were not publicly disclosed, a committee of external experts selected six pilot regions—Bucheon, Pohang, Jongno, Cheonan, Changwon, and Suncheon—based on implementation readiness, including local healthcare and employment infrastructure, planning quality, and administrative commitment. These sites reflect diverse labor market conditions: Bucheon and Pohang are manufacturing-oriented with a sizable precarious workforce; Jongno encompasses both formal professional services and small-scale manufacturing such as metal crafting workshops, typically employing fewer than five workers (Under South Korea's Labor Standards Act, workers in small enterprises with fewer than five employees are excluded from basic labor protections such as dismissal safeguards, working time regulations, and paid leave entitlements.), creating pronounced labor market stratification; Cheonan and Changwon are industrial cities with relatively stable employment; and Suncheon, a more rural area, has the highest share of unpaid family workers. These variations likely influenced both program delivery and access, highlighting the importance of regional labor contexts.
The comprehensive evaluation conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs in 202322 found that the program primarily attracted vulnerable workers: 77.9% were wage earners and 22.1% were non-wage earners, 57.7% were precarious employees and 11.7% came from Medical Aid recipient households. However, it is problematic that these results were utilized to justify program contraction rather than universal expansion. The government narrowed the second-phase pilot to the bottom 50% income bracket, retrospectively justifying this decision by citing that 70.2% of first-phase applicants came from this demographic. At first glance, this approach seems to focus on those with greater need. However, given the low replacement rates and long waiting periods embedded in the initial model, the real question should be why those in the upper 50% income bracket did not apply.
Rather than justifying targeting narrower populations, this pattern might be better interpreted as revealing fundamental paradoxes within the system’s design. Most notably, the model with the longest waiting period (14 days) appears to have captured the highest application rates among the most precarious workers—day laborers and solo self-employed individuals who simultaneously face the highest risks of institutional exclusion. This finding becomes even more striking when considering that the regions implementing this model actually had relatively lower rates of precarious employment compared to other areas. While regular employees encounter institutional barriers to taking sick leave due to job security concerns and limited legal protections, this pattern suggests that workers with high employment instability may have found themselves with little choice but to accept the least favorable conditions, as their structural exclusion from employment protections left them with few alternatives.
The program’s income replacement mechanism further reinforced these paradoxical outcomes. Set at 60% of the minimum wage, the benefit level failed to provide adequate incentives for standard employees to prioritize health recovery over continued work, while simultaneously serving as a relatively attractive option for low-wage earners whose usual income approximated this amount. First-year pilot data reveals this stratified impact: while National Health Insurance workplace subscribers achieved average replacement rates in the 60% range, dependents in Pohang and Suncheon exceeded 80%, and temporary workers in Jongno, Suncheon, and Changwon achieved replacement ratios above 80%.
This paradox—wherein the system primarily serves those for whom maintaining employment relationships is definitionally inapplicable or who face proportionally greater income losses due to illness—risks evolving into what Korpi and Palme termed the “paradox of redistribution.”23 Policies based on means-testing or targeted approaches focusing on high-risk groups often struggle to build broad political support, resulting in less effective redistributive outcomes. Given that Korea’s sickness benefit can hardly be said to have established a solid political support base, the trajectory toward narrowing eligibility appears counterproductive.
The challenges of introducing sickness benefits within Korea’s current welfare and labor market configuration extend far beyond the dualized labor market structure. Beneath this ostensibly inclusive framework lies a complex web of eligibility criteria that systematically reproduce exclusions. To qualify as an “employed person,” applicants must satisfy multiple institutional requirements: (1) Korean citizenship; (2) age between 15 and 65; (3) maintenance of either workplace-based National Health Insurance (1 month), Employment Insurance or Workers' Compensation (1 month), or business registration (3 months); (4) exclusion of civil servants and national/public school employees; and (5) non-receipt of benefits from other schemes or automobile insurance. Since the second-phase pilot in 2023, (6) an additional means-test was imposed, limiting eligibility to households in the bottom 50% income bracket. Nevertheless, many individuals who find it difficult to meet all these criteria continue to work and sustain their livelihoods.
Securing the right to paid sick leave—especially for precarious workers and vulnerable groups—will require sustained effort. A meaningful sickness benefit system must begin by recognizing the uneven distribution of in-work poverty and health risks. Indeed, these two elements should serve as the core criteria by which the success or failure of Korea's sickness benefit system is evaluated. Through this process, those in disadvantaged positions will become visible, and any assessment of the system must incorporate considerations of health equity, people-centered design, and gender sensitivity as foundational elements.
Importantly, sickness benefits extend beyond theoretical health coverage to serve as a vital tool for disrupting the vicious cycle in which illness leads to financial crisis and poverty. Beyond financial suffering, workers face additional social costs including difficulties securing replacement labor, reputational damage, and performance rating deterioration in increasingly algorithmic work environments. By guaranteeing the right to paid sick leave and recovery without income loss, they facilitate individuals’ return to society and the workforce—embodying the essence of social protection. Korea now has a unique opportunity to transcend the limitations of existing policies and pioneer a more transformative approach.
Beyond these concrete developments, strategic considerations around system design remain crucial.24,25 The current trajectory risks the paradox of redistribution. What is required instead is a proportionate universalism strategy from population health perspectives that implements universal policies while redistributing benefits proportionally to varying needs and degrees of disadvantages, considering given the structure of inequalities, rather than simply limiting eligibility to those demographics that dominated pilot program applications.24,25
Promising foundations already exist. Jeonju, which joined the second-phase pilot, recently abolished the bottom 50% income criterion and expanded eligibility back to “all employed persons.”26 Furthermore, for National Health Insurance workplace subscribers, the city introduced a proportional payment system, extending benefits to up to 60% of the average wage over the previous three months. Beyond sickness benefit reforms, the National Pension scheme’s childbirth credit program offers pension-qualifying credits for child-rearing periods, albeit only from the second child onward. Despite its limited scope and effectiveness, this measure formally acknowledges unpaid reproductive labor—predominantly performed by women—as a socially valuable contribution deserving institutional recognition.27 Such precedents offer valuable blueprints for moving beyond gender-sensitive approaches toward genuinely gender-transformative sickness benefit criteria that actively challenge existing power structures rather than merely accommodating them.28
Ultimately, Korea stands at a pivotal juncture. The sickness benefit system can serve not merely as a technocratic solution to labor market inequalities, but as a profound rearticulation of social citizenship. Successful implementation will depend on integrating equity, people-centered design, and gender-transformative perspectives into every phase—design, operation, evaluation, and reform. In doing so, Korea has the opportunity to offer a model of sickness protection that does not simply patch gaps, but actively reshapes the structures that produce health and economic inequalities in the first place.

UHC

universal health coverage

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author contributions

Conceptualization/formal analysis/validation: Moon D, Choi H. Visualization: Moon D. Writing - original draft: Moon D, Choi H. Writing - review & editing: Moon D.

Acknowledgments

This study was developed based on the issue papers published by people’s health institute and the activities of the Collective Action for the Right to Sick Leave. The authors used OpenAI's ChatGPT (version GPT-4o, April 2025 release; OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA) and Claude (version Sonnet 4, May 2025 release; Anthropic, San Francisco, CA, USA) to assist with the initial English translation of portions of the manuscript originally written in Korean. The authors reviewed all AI-assisted content for accuracy, and the final manuscript was professionally proofread and underwent final English editing by a translation expert.

Fig. 1.
Health and poverty trap and policy entry points. Solid arrows represent causal pathways; dashed arrows represent intervention points. Importantly, this cycle does not always begin with poor health. Economic hardship, care responsibilities, or loss of income may initiate the same downward spiral.
aoem-2025-37-e25f1.tif
Fig. 2.
Characteristics of sickness benefit pilot applicants (n = 829). Income figures in million KRW. Based on survey data from Ministry of Health and Welfare evaluation.
aoem-2025-37-e25f2.tif
Table 1.
Sickness benefit pilot implementation: regional variations in design and labor market context
Model 1
 Model 2
 Model 3
Bucheon-si (n= 158) Pohang-si (n = 132) Jongno-gu (n = 22) Cheonan-si (n = 122) Changwon-si (n = 289) Suncheon-si (n = 106)
Designs for sickness benefits
 Conditionality Incapacity for work Incapacity for work Hospitalization
 Benefits 60% of minimum wage
 Waiting periods (days) 7 14 3
 Benefit duration (days) 90 120 90
  Duration of average benefit receipta (days) Not reported 29 22 13 15
Regional characteristics
 Major industries (top 3) Manufacturing (24.95%) Manufacturing (24.46%) Professional, scientific and technical activities (13.75%) Manufacturing (34.19%) Manufacturing (33.11%) Human health and social work activities (19.69%)
Human health and social work activities (15.87%) Human health and social work activities (14.80%) Wholesale and retail trade (13.54%) Human health and social work activities (11.82%) Human health and social work activities (12.81%) Construction (13.45%)
Wholesale and retail trade (12.91%) Construction (10.76%) Financial and insurance activities (11.22%) Wholesale and retail trade (10.07%) Wholesale and retail trade (9.09%) Wholesale and retail trade (12.47%)
Employment structure
 Standard (%) 72.12 74.87 84.68 79.59 79.24 66.31
 Temporary/daily (%) 13.73 14.56 8.11 10.91 10.06 17.06
 Self-employed (%) 7.22 5.14 4.28 5.32 5.71 6.63
 Unpaid family workers (%) 6.93 5.43 2.93 4.18 4.99 9.94
Applicants characteristics
 Above-average applicant groupsb Self-employed without employees (12.1%) Temporary employees (12.3%), self-employed without employees (18.0%) Self-employed with employees (14.2%)
 Employment conditions Precarious employment (61.3%) Precarious employment (70.1%)

This table was compiled by the authors using data from the initial evaluation study by Kang et al. and the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s Survey on Survey on Establishment Labor Conditions.

a~; bEmployment types with disproportionately high participation relative to regional labor market composition.

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        A sickness benefit for all, leaving no one behind
        Korean Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2025;e25  Published online July 28, 2025
        DOI: https://doi.org/10.35371/aoem.2025.37.e25
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      A sickness benefit for all, leaving no one behind
      Image Image
      Fig. 1. Health and poverty trap and policy entry points. Solid arrows represent causal pathways; dashed arrows represent intervention points. Importantly, this cycle does not always begin with poor health. Economic hardship, care responsibilities, or loss of income may initiate the same downward spiral.
      Fig. 2. Characteristics of sickness benefit pilot applicants (n = 829). Income figures in million KRW. Based on survey data from Ministry of Health and Welfare evaluation.

      Fig. 1.

      Fig. 2.

      A sickness benefit for all, leaving no one behind
      Model 1
      		 Model 2
      		 Model 3
      Bucheon-si (n= 158) Pohang-si (n = 132) Jongno-gu (n = 22) Cheonan-si (n = 122) Changwon-si (n = 289) Suncheon-si (n = 106)
      Designs for sickness benefits
       Conditionality Incapacity for work Incapacity for work Hospitalization
       Benefits 60% of minimum wage
       Waiting periods (days) 7 14 3
       Benefit duration (days) 90 120 90
        Duration of average benefit receipta (days) Not reported 29 22 13 15
      Regional characteristics
       Major industries (top 3) Manufacturing (24.95%) Manufacturing (24.46%) Professional, scientific and technical activities (13.75%) Manufacturing (34.19%) Manufacturing (33.11%) Human health and social work activities (19.69%)
      Human health and social work activities (15.87%) Human health and social work activities (14.80%) Wholesale and retail trade (13.54%) Human health and social work activities (11.82%) Human health and social work activities (12.81%) Construction (13.45%)
      Wholesale and retail trade (12.91%) Construction (10.76%) Financial and insurance activities (11.22%) Wholesale and retail trade (10.07%) Wholesale and retail trade (9.09%) Wholesale and retail trade (12.47%)
      Employment structure
       Standard (%) 72.12 74.87 84.68 79.59 79.24 66.31
       Temporary/daily (%) 13.73 14.56 8.11 10.91 10.06 17.06
       Self-employed (%) 7.22 5.14 4.28 5.32 5.71 6.63
       Unpaid family workers (%) 6.93 5.43 2.93 4.18 4.99 9.94
      Applicants characteristics
       Above-average applicant groupsb Self-employed without employees (12.1%) Temporary employees (12.3%), self-employed without employees (18.0%) Self-employed with employees (14.2%)
       Employment conditions Precarious employment (61.3%) Precarious employment (70.1%)
      Table 1. Sickness benefit pilot implementation: regional variations in design and labor market context

      This table was compiled by the authors using data from the initial evaluation study by Kang et al. and the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s Survey on Survey on Establishment Labor Conditions.

      Employment types with disproportionately high participation relative to regional labor market composition.

      Table 1.

      Ann Occup Environ Med : Annals of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
      © Korean Society of Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
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