The Seoul Footnote

A foreign employee in Seoul files her year-end settlement in January and claims her mother, who lives with her and earned 3,400,000 won last year from a part-time job at a neighbourhood shop. The payroll office strikes the claim out. A colleague two floors up claims his father on the same facts and the claim goes through. Neither office is improvising. Each has read a different line in a publication issued by the same tax authority in the same month, and each prints a figure for what looks like one test. One line puts the figure at 1,000,000 won. The other puts it at 5,000,000 won. They are not two spellings of a single threshold. Run a part-time wage through the National Tax Service's own deduction table and the two readings part company for every gross wage between about 3,333,333 won and 5,000,000 won, a band 1,666,667 won wide. What follows is that one line traced through the agency's own English documents and through the arithmetic they supply. The Scene Korea settle...

A foreigner lands at Incheon in early March on a short-term entry, finds work, and walks out of an immigration office on the first of May holding a freshly stamped change of status. The clerk says the alien registration is due. Due when? One adviser counts ninety days from the first of May. A second counts ninety days from the March arrival and concludes that the deadline has nearly run out. A third says the filing was already due at the moment the stamp came down. None of the three is inventing a rule. Each has picked a different paragraph of the same article. Korea's Immigration Act prints the number ninety in each of them, but two count from entry and the third from the grant, and in two of them it does not give you ninety days at all. The Scene Take the dates as fixed. Entry on the second of March. A change of status under "제24조" , Article 24, granted on the first of May. Departure booked for the twentieth of June. Counted from entry, that stay runs 111 days. ...

The Scene A one-room flat in Seoul, let on the ordinary arrangement: a deposit of 3,000,000 won and a rent of 350,000 won a month. The agency drafted the lease, the tenant moved in, and the invoice for the brokerage fee came to 190,000 won. The tenant had already worked the figure out from the same rate table framed on the agency wall, and had reached 137,500 won. Neither had misread the table, and both had taken 0.5 percent of a transaction value. They had built that value two different ways. Korea charges the brokerage fee neither on the rent nor on the deposit, but on a converted figure the ministry rule assembles out of both. One sentence of that rule assembles 38,000,000 won from this lease. The sentence immediately after it assembles 27,500,000 won from the same lease. The first figure exists to decide which of the two sentences applies; the second is the one the fee is charged on. Treating the first as the base is the whole of the disagreement, and on this lease it is worth 52...

The Scene A postgraduate student takes a weekend shift at a bakery in Mapo. The written contract sets the schedule at 14 hours a week, seven on Saturday and seven on Sunday. Trade is heavy that month, so the shifts run long: the payslip shows 18 hours in the first week, 18 in the second, 16 in the third and 16 in the fourth. When the month closes, the pay covers the hours worked and nothing else. There is no line for a paid weekly holiday. She looks the rule up and finds the number that every explainer repeats: 15 hours a week. Measured against the payslip she cleared that line in each of the four weeks, with an average of 17. So the missing holiday pay looks like a shortfall, and she says so. The owner answers with a different number, the 14 in the contract, and refuses. Neither of them is misquoting the statute. They are reading the same sentence and measuring two different things. The sentence is "제18조제3항" , Article 18(3) of the Labor Standards Act. The argument is not ...