hundreds of people are already spilling into the road outside Seoul’s Namguro station. They are not here for the trains, which will not begin for another hour. Nor are they attracted by the dawn cafeterias , the upstairs song rooms or the basement spas . They are gathered instead to offer their labour in return for a day’s wages, at whatever building site needs extra hands. As they wait for a bidder, they smoke, squat and cough. And they speak not in Korean but in gravelly Mandarin.
One reason is the tigers’ work culture. “If a country requires its people to be locked up in their workplace, no wonder the birth rate is so low,” says Joyce Yang, who quit her public-relations job in Taipei after too many midnight finishes to the day. In South Korea, President Moon’s government has cut the maximum workweek to 52 hours . Ms Yang chose a more radical solution: moving to Australia, from where she urges her 30,000 Facebook followers to quit their workaholism.
Faced with this burden, some parents fabricate their children’s qualifications. One academic paper in 2009 on the genetic precursors of disease was supposedly co-written by the daughter of Cho Kuk, Mr Moon’s justice minister, even though she was only a schoolgirl at the time. He was forced to resign in shame.To improve their unfavourable age structure, the tigers will have to combine shorter working weeks with longer working lives. They will need more people like Neo Kwee Leng.
Another way for the tigers to cope with their ageing is to permit more immigration. The foreign population accounts for 6% of the workforce in Taiwan and about 3.3% in South Korea. That is low by Western standards, but higher than Japan, where foreigners make up only 2%. In the two tiger cities the reliance on immigrants is far more dramatic. Much of Hong Kong’s population was born elsewhere, including over 2.2m from other parts of China.
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