Young Adults Face Shrinking Job Opportunities and Widening Wealth Gap

Generation shut out

Young adults face shrinking job opportunities, widening wealth gap, fading hopes for future

Statistics confirm the grim reality facing the younger generation.

According to the Ministry of Data and Statistics' May 2026 Employment Trends report released on June 11, employment among young people ages 15-29 shrank by 255,000 from a year earlier.

It was the sharpest decrease since January 2021, when the country was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and marked the 43rd consecutive month of decline. The job-market woes facing young people, who will lead our society in the future, are becoming increasingly prolonged.

Despite an unprecedented export boom fueled by the semiconductor industry, job opportunities for young people are vanishing. While employees at some major corporations benefiting from the semiconductor supercycle are receiving performance bonuses in the hundreds of millions of won, many young people cannot even secure jobs with annual salaries in the tens of millions of won. This is a telling illustration of the troubling reality that employment polarization is reaching alarming levels.

A June 11 report by the Bank of Korea found that the proportion of people in their 20s and 30s among households in the bottom quintile for both net assets and income nearly doubled from 7.9 percent in 2020 to 15.2 percent in 2025.

During this period, the share of every other age group either held steady or declined, while that of people in their 20s and 30s rose. This is a warning sign that many young people are falling through the cracks of the labor market into the lower-income bracket without ever having had a chance to gain a proper foothold in the workforce.

In the past, even those who found it difficult to get a job could still aspire to buy a home and build wealth through steady savings once they entered the workforce. However, today's young people feel helpless and discouraged in the face of stark inequalities that exist from the very start of their adult lives.

The wealth gap between these young people and the older generation has widened significantly, particularly because of rising real estate prices. The median apartment price in Seoul exceeded 1.2 billion won ($792,000) this year, climbing by more than 100 million won since the start of the year. The benefits of rising real estate prices have been concentrated among middle-aged and older people who already own homes.

The older generation bears significant responsibility for this. They have monopolized stable and regular jobs, entrenched a seniority-based wage system and made layoffs difficult through powerful labor unions. Companies are reluctant to hire new workers because they must shoulder the high labor costs of existing employees.

It is young people who are bearing the brunt of the resulting hiring squeeze. As many as 140,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in May, marking the 23rd consecutive month of decline. If the current administration's plan to extend the mandatory retirement age to 65 is implemented, employment prospects for young people will deteriorate even further.

Artificial intelligence is creating a new source of job insecurity. Employment in the professional, scientific and technical services sectors fell by 89,000 in May from a year earlier. AI is rapidly replacing tasks traditionally performed by entry-level white-collar workers.

The solution begins with youth employment. The nation must focus its resources and capabilities on creating quality jobs for young people.

First and foremost, companies must be encouraged to take the lead in job creation. To do so, the government must first remove regulations that discourage companies from hiring and investing, such as the Yellow Envelope Act. The rigid employment system that discourages companies from hiring should be reformed, and any extension of the mandatory retirement age should be pursued cautiously so as not to harm young people's employment prospects.