Over 2,000 Elderly Residents Face Care Vacuum as 150 Living Support Workers Face Sudden Job Loss

[Anchor]

Some 150 living support workers in Jeju are facing the prospect of losing their jobs all at once by the end of this year. This is due to a newly applied mandatory retirement age of 65. With these workers currently caring for more than 2,000 elderly individuals, concerns are growing over a potential care vacuum.

Reporter Kim Jae-yeon from JIBS.

[Reporter]

Song Bok-hee, 65, has been working as a living support worker for eight years.

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

Checking on their well-being and having conversations are also vital parts of her job.

[Elderly resident living alone: There is nobody to visit and nobody to call. Because Teacher Song keeps coming every day and calling me, I rely on her. She does a wonderful job. She keeps coming, comes every day. She is top-tier.]

To the seniors, living support workers are their closest friends and reliable pillars of support.

[Elderly resident living alone: I rely on her a lot. I wait for her calls. I am glad when she comes. It is nice. I can talk as much as I want, and once she leaves, my mind feels relieved and I am glad.]

There are currently around 600 living support workers active in the province, with each person in charge of about 15 seniors.

However, 150 of them, accounting for 25% of the total, are at risk of losing their jobs by the end of this year.

This is because, under the Ministry of Health and Welfare guidelines implemented this year, a mandatory retirement age of 65 has been established for living support workers, a rule that did not previously exist.

Living support workers are protesting, pointing out that while other local governments such as Gangwon and Suwon have already agreed upon and implemented extensions to the retirement age, Jeju alone is delaying action.

[Han Myung-sook, Head of the Jeju Living Support Workers Chapter, Korean Public Service and Transport Workers' Union: The Jeju provincial government must no longer shift the responsibility. It must make a responsible decision right now so that experienced living support workers can continue to work and seniors can receive stable care.]

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

[Jeju Special Self-Governing Province Official: Because these matters are handled through employment with direct employers, we state that we are not in a position to set a broad framework for this.]

If 150 living support workers retire all at once, the personnel in charge of the seniors they look after will change on a massive scale.

Calls are growing louder for measures to be put in place to protect the continuity of care.

(Video by Kang Myung-cheol / JIBS)

JIBS Kim Jae-yeon
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.