Korean firm offer incentives for workers to have more children

SEOUL, June 12 (UPI) -- South Korean construction management company HanmiGlobal said any employee with three or more children would receive an immediate promotion as part of the firm's effort to encourage workers to have more children.

Friday's announcement comes on the heel of recent findings that Korea, as a society, lags the world in its fertility rate, which has been worsening in recent years.

HanmiGlobal, which has over 1,000 employees, said it will also allot extra points to job applicants with children.

For current employees, maternal or paternal leave has been extended for up to two years. It will also pay a $3,900 bonus to any employee who has a third child and $6,700 for a fourth child.

The Seoul-based company said the new incentive structure was designed to encourage more childbirths.

"We are considering other ideas also, such as constructing new apartments and lower interest rate loans for our employees with children," HanmiGlobal human resources team leader Park Jung-wook said in a statement.

"Our hope is that such efforts can help encourage and facilitate our average employee family growing to two-children household within 10 years," he said.

Since 2013, South Korea has remained at the bottom of the world's fertility rate, with the total population dropping 0.8% in the past three years.

The average number of children born to a woman in South Korea in her reproductive period was 0.78 last year, far lower than the 2.1 necessary to maintain the country's 51.4 million population.

The number of marriages has also been on the decline. Statistics Korea noted that only 192,000 couples tied the knot there in 2022, the lowest since 1970.

The South Korean government has spent billions over the past few decades to encourage marriages and childbirth with little effect.