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Watching the Koreans

Japan Calls It Karoshi. Korea Calls It Gwarosa — Working Yourself to Death.

In short

Korea passed a law in 2018 cutting the maximum legal workweek from 68 hours to 52 after a string of deaths attributed to overwork. Government data since then shows two-thirds of overwork-death claims still get rejected, and in 2026 lawmakers are actively negotiating exceptions to the very cap the law created.

In this article

1. Two words for the same outcome
2. A 68-hour week, and the law that shortened it
3. What "recognized" actually means in the data
4. Still near the top of the OECD list
5. The exception being negotiated right now

In 2018, the South Korean government did something most countries never do: it looked at how many hours the law allowed people to work in a week — 68 — and concluded that the number itself was part of the problem. The legal maximum was cut to 52. That kind of top-down correction doesn't happen over abstract concerns about productivity. It happens when enough workers have died that the number in the law becomes politically impossible to defend.

The term Korean uses for that outcome is

gwarosa

gwarosa (과로사) — death attributed to overwork, most often from a stress-related stroke or heart attack.

, and it isn't a Korean invention. Japan named the same phenomenon decades earlier — karoshi — and both countries now sit inside the same uncomfortable category of economies that had to give death by overwork its own word.

Two words for the same outcome

Karoshi entered Japanese vocabulary and international reporting well before gwarosa did, describing sudden death — usually stroke or heart attack — linked to extreme working hours and job stress. Korea's gwarosa describes the same clinical outcome, but grew out of a distinct set of conditions: a work culture with historically long, often six-day workweeks, and a strong social expectation that visible effort and time at work signal loyalty to the organization. The two words don't describe two different problems. They describe the same medical reality showing up in two neighboring economies that each built a national work culture demanding enough hours to produce it repeatedly.

That two countries independently needed a specific word for this — rather than folding it into general language about stress or illness — is itself a data point. Most languages don't need a single noun for "died from working too much" because it isn't common enough to require one.

English has no equivalent single word, and that gap shows up in how the topic gets covered outside Japan and Korea. English-language reporting on gwarosa and karoshi almost always keeps the original term rather than translating it, the way outlets don't bother translating words like "tsunami" — a sign the concept doesn't map cleanly onto anything English already had a name for. "Burnout," the closest English candidate, describes exhaustion and disengagement over time. It doesn't describe a specific, medically identifiable death. Gwarosa and karoshi both do.

A 68-hour week, and the law that shortened it

Before 2018, Korean law permitted a 68-hour workweek: a standard 40 hours plus up to 28 hours of overtime. Official figures showing hundreds of workers dying from overwork-related causes in a single year became part of the pressure that led South Korea's government to legislate a lower ceiling — a maximum 52-hour week, made up of 40 standard hours and 12 hours of paid overtime, phased in across employers of different sizes.

The law was a real policy response to a documented problem, not a symbolic gesture. But a legal ceiling only does the work a ceiling can do: it caps the extreme end, and it depends on enforcement and on employers not finding routes around it. Both of those turn out to be exactly where the gwarosa story gets complicated.

What "recognized" actually means in the data

Getting a death or illness officially classified as gwarosa in Korea is its own process, run through the Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service. Korean labor authorities generally treat a fatal heart attack or stroke suffered by someone who had been working more than 60 hours a week over the prior three months as eligible grounds for a workplace-death claim. Eligible is not the same as automatic.

Data reported to Korea's Ministry of Employment and Labor shows that between 2023 and February 2026, families and workers filed 1,992 applications for overwork-related industrial-accident recognition. Of those, 663 — about a third — were officially recognized. In every one of those 663 recognized cases, the reporting found zero instances where the employer who directed the work was referred for any punishment. The law creates a path to recognition and, in principle, compensation. It does not, in practice, appear to create consequences for the employer on the other end of that recognition.

One documented case shows what sits behind those numbers. Jang Deok-joon, a 27-year-old delivery worker at a Coupang logistics center, died of a heart attack after returning home from an overnight shift, following 16 months on a schedule that ran from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. (UPI). His death was later officially recognized as a work-related industrial accident. Labor advocates and reporting on the broader pattern at the same company have pointed to roughly nine deaths linked to overwork at Coupang facilities between 2020 and 2021 alone, concentrated among workers doing overnight logistics and delivery shifts as the company raced to meet fast-delivery demand. Recognition, in Jang's case, came after his death — not before it, in time to change anything.

The law creates a path to recognition and, in principle, compensation. It does not, in practice, appear to create consequences for the employer on the other end of that recognition.

Still near the top of the OECD list

Korea's overall working hours have genuinely fallen. In 2023, Korean workers logged an average of 1,874 hours for the year — the first time that figure dropped below 1,900, and roughly 200 hours less than a decade earlier. That's real, measurable progress by the country's own historical standard.

Set against other economies, the picture looks less like progress and more like Korea moving from extreme to merely high. Based on OECD data, Korea's 1,901 annual hours per worker in 2022 ranked fifth-longest among the organization's 38 member countries — about 149 hours more than the OECD average of 1,752 — with only Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, and Israel logging more. Korea isn't the outlier it once was on paper. It's still comfortably inside the small group of developed economies where the average worker's year runs meaningfully longer than peers in Germany, France, or the United States.

The exception being negotiated right now

The most recent development complicates the trend line further. Through 2024 and into 2026, Korean lawmakers have repeatedly debated carving exceptions into the 52-hour cap for specific groups — most notably a "white-collar exemption" that would let managers and R&D employees in the top income bracket opt out of the weekly limit with individual consent, first proposed for the semiconductor industry and later discussed more broadly. A version of the exemption was stripped from a semiconductor-industry bill in early 2026 after opposition, but by mid-2026 the same party that had opposed it reversed position, and the exemption is back under active discussion as part of the country's economic growth strategy.

None of this means Korea's overwork problem is worsening in a simple, linear way — hours are down, and the country has a functioning, if imperfect, recognition system that didn't exist a generation ago. But the direction of the most recent policy fight is a reminder that a 52-hour ceiling, hard-won after a documented wave of gwarosa deaths, is treated as negotiable the moment a different economic pressure — this time, competitiveness in a strategic industry — makes a longer week look convenient again. The same tension between visible effort and actual wellbeing runs through the culture's unwritten overtime expectations and its history of treating stress as something to be absorbed quietly rather than named — a pattern gwarosa represents in its most severe, irreversible form.