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...

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 ...

The Scene Two months before a lease runs out, a tenant in a Korean drama is told the owner's mother is moving in, and the episode ends with boxes being taped shut. Three episodes later a stranger is carrying boxes up the same stairwell, and the story moves on. The Housing Lease Protection Act does not stop an owner from taking a home back to live in. It prices the promise afterwards, and it prices it three different ways. What the Rule Actually Says The governing text is the Housing Lease Protection Act (주택임대차보호법), in the version in force from 2 January 2026, promulgated as Act No. 21065 on 1 October 2025, together with its Enforcement Decree (주택임대차보호법 시행령), Presidential Decree No. 36423, in force from 1 July 2026. Both are published by the Ministry of Government Legislation through the National Law Information Center. The Korean text is the law; the ...