Only Companion to Vanish as Soon as the End of This Year? "Why Only in Jeju"

65-year-old Song Bok-hee has been working as a care support worker for eight years.

Every day, she visits elderly people living alone to look after their daily lives.

Checking on their well-being and having conversations are also important duties.

[Elderly person living alone: There is no one to visit, and no one to call, so I rely on Teacher Lee because she keeps coming and calling every day. She does a great job. She keeps coming, every day. She is definitely number one.]

To the seniors, care support workers are their closest friends and dependable pillars of support.

[Elderly person living alone: I rely on them a lot. I wait for their calls, and I am glad and happy when they visit. No matter how much we talk, my mind feels relieved and I am happy when they leave.]

Currently, there are around 600 active care support workers in the province, with each person in charge of about 15 seniors.

However, 150 of them, accounting for 25 percent of the total, face the risk of losing their jobs by the end of this year.

This is because, under a Ministry of Health and Welfare guideline implemented starting this year, a retirement age of 65 has been established for care support workers, which did not exist previously.

Care support workers are protesting that while other local governments such as Gangwon and Suwon have already agreed on and implemented extensions to the retirement age, the processing is being delayed only in Jeju.

[Han Myung-sook, Head of the Jeju Care Support Worker Branch of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers' Union: The Jeju provincial government must no longer delay its responsibility. It must make a responsible decision right now so that experienced care support workers can continue working and seniors can receive stable care.]

The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province maintains that since the direct employers of the care support workers are the respective operating agencies, whether or not to extend the retirement age is a matter for the agencies and workers to negotiate.

[Jeju Special Self-Governing Province official: Since this is a matter handled through employment with direct employers, we would like to state that we are not in a position to set a broad framework for this.]

If 150 care support workers retire all at once, the personnel in charge of the seniors they manage will also change en masse.

Voices are growing louder that measures need to be prepared to protect the continuity of care.

In Charge of Over 2,000 Seniors... Sudden Risk of Retirement Comes Like a Bolt from the Blue (August 5, 2026, 12 PM News)

Reported by Kim Jae-yeon (JIBS) | Written by Bae Jun-hwi | Video by Kang Myung-chul (JIBS) | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.