Nearly eight in 10 workers say Korea is unwelcoming to workers with disabilities, a civic labor group survey found, underscoring a gap between steadily rising employment figures and the workplace reality many workers with disabilities face.
According to the poll released on Sunday by nonprofit advocacy group Gapjil 119, 76.7 percent of 1,000 respondents aged 19 and older said Korea is not a society where people with disabilities can work comfortably.
The sentiment was strongest at small private firms with fewer than five employees, at 85.7 percent, compared with 70.3 percent at larger companies with 300 or more employees, and 69.9 percent at public institutions. Women were more likely to share that view than men — 81.2 percent compared to 72.5 percent.
Nearly half of respondents — 46.2 percent, precisely — said their workplace harbors bias or a discriminatory atmosphere toward hiring people with disabilities, while 51 percent said their workplace lacks barrier-free spaces.
Derogatory or mocking language toward people with disabilities was also a reality for some, with 17.4 percent of respondents saying they had heard such expressions at work.
The results came despite the share of workers with disabilities in Korea rising slowly but steadily in official figures in recent years. In 2024, the overall disability employment rate reached 3.21 percent, up 0.67 percentage points from a decade ago, according to the Ministry of Employment and Labor.
The private sector rate of 3.03 percent left it just 0.07 percentage points short of the legal mandate, the narrowest gap since the quota system launched in 1991. Korea mandates that private firms hire at least 3.1 percent of their workforce as people with disabilities, with the threshold set at 3.8 percent for public institutions. Employers with 50 or more full-time workers are required to meet the quota, while those with 100 or more who fall short must pay a levy.
Workers with severe disabilities made up 35.8 percent of the workforce of people with disabilities in 2024, up 5.9 percentage points from 2020, while the share of women in that group rose 3 percentage points to 28.7 percent over the same period.
Source: Korea Times News
