Hyun Hyuk-jun (played by Lee Jae-wook), the main character of the Netflix series 'Honey Part-time Job', which was released on the 30th of last month, is a young man driven by debt. After being the victim of a rental fraud and incurring a debt of over 100 million won, he tries to throw himself off the Han River bridge, but finds a flyer for a part-time job with ultra-high daily wages that says, "Escape from the swamp of debt through labor," and seeks out the president (Lee Hee-jun) of the human resources office 'Gummy Human Resources'.
The boss proposes a suspicious part-time job that pays 50 times the minimum wage. If you succeed in part-time work, as if completing the game's quest (mission), your next daily wage will be at least twice as high. However, what happens at work must never be revealed to the outside world.
'Honey Part-time Job' depicts the survival story of Byeong-jun Byeok-jun, a young man on the edge of a precipice, as he dives into a bizarre part-time job in pursuit of a large hourly wage.
According to the Netflix Top 10 compiled by Netflix's official site Todoom on the 4th, this work ranked 4th among non-English shows, recording 5 million views (views (viewing time divided by the total running time of the work)) within 3 days of its release. Immediately after its release, it ranked first in the Top 10 series in Korea and ranked in the top 10 in 51 countries, including Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, and India.
The work twists the meaning of 'honey part-time job', which means that the pay is high compared to the intensity of the work and the working environment is comfortable, turning the familiar workplace into a stage of horror. To earn money, Byun Hyuk-jun takes on part-time jobs such as working the night shift at a convenience store, delivering milk, working as a day laborer at a construction site, and playing a doll at an amusement park. However, incomprehensible rules and life-threatening incidents lurk in seemingly ordinary workplaces.
If you are the main character of a typical horror story, you will quickly run away from threats to your life. However, Hyuk-jun Byeong-jun heads back to his terrible workplace to pay off his debts despite facing death several times, to buy shoes for his younger sister Byun Ji-yoon (Kim Min-ha) to wear to an interview, and to raise money for the hospital expenses of his friend Kwak Byeong-cheol (Lee Seok-hyung), who suffered an industrial accident but did not receive compensation from the company.
'Honey Part-Time Job' depicts the reality of having no choice but to return to a workplace where one might die, and asks what the real fear is. Fear of not being able to pay next month's rent and being unable to stop working even in the face of the appearance of a monster or fear of death is the essence of fear. Byun Ji-yoon's line in the play, "Are you afraid of ghosts? Are you afraid of becoming a beggar?" clearly reveals the critical nature of the work.
The way to convey this awareness of the problem is the grammar of ghost stories that are recently popular online. It helps to approach the somewhat heavy topic of the contradictions of labor by interpreting it through the genres of horror, horror, fantasy, and black comedy.
'Honey Alba' actively borrows the structure of urban ghost stories, such as 'Neapolitan ghost stories' that follow strange rules and the 'SCP Foundation', a virtual organization that isolates and manages supernatural beings.
These ghost stories only present rules to follow in order to survive, without revealing the true nature of the danger. This is similar to the reality of workers who are not properly aware of the risks or who sometimes have to take risks but follow unreasonable instructions to make a living.
Drama critic Yoon Seok-jin, a professor of Korean literature at Chungnam National University, commented, "'Honey Part-Time Job' is unique in its recognition of the problem and the way it expresses it. It is interesting how it talks about the reality by depicting the reality of labor more powerfully and realistically than any other method through a fantasy based on fear."
The fear of ‘honey’s part-time job’ continues from generation to generation. The father (Baek Hyun-jin), who lost all his wealth by making a mistake in guaranteeing, goes out to work in dangerous labor in pursuit of the ultra-high-paying daily wages of the 'spider workforce' like his son Hyun Hyeok-jun, with the dream of buying an apartment for his family, and never returns.
Eum Yeon-ju (Go Min-si), an accident investigator at the Labor Accident Protection Agency, is a female worker at Gyeongil Textiles, a textile factory that fought for survival and dignity in a harsh working environment 40 years ago. His story reminds us of the 1978 Dongil Textile incident in which human waste was thrown at female workers.
Professor Yoon analyzed, “It is a very cruel and tragic perception of the world that shows that the problem of labor for livelihood is being repeated not simply in the present but over a 40-year time gap,” and “It symbolically shows that this problem cannot be solved through individual efforts but is a structural contradiction.”
Even overseas, attention was paid to 'Honey's part-time job', which embedded satire on labor and livelihood in horror and horror films.
Forbes said, "Capitalism has finally reached a point where it puts even horror movies set in the workplace to shame. So many people live in fear every day, being harassed by demands for rent and debt, and emails from superiors that start with 'I'm contacting you again regarding something I mentioned last time,' so why bother creating monsters?"
He went on to say, “‘Honey Part-Time Job’ accurately penetrates the irony of this amazing reality and even makes a real monster appear, showing more blatantly the absurdity of the reality we face,” and introduced this work as ‘a comedy for office workers who have at least once fantasized about setting fire to the office microwave.’
