The Progress in the Implementation of Sickness Benefit After Covid-19 and Its Implications

Abstract

The sickness benefit is a publicly funded income support scheme to help workers during the period in which they are unable to work due to an off-the-job injury or illness, so that they can receive adequate treatment and return to work and to prevent poverty due to health shocks. At the corporate and societal level, it is also a device to mitigate the decline in labor productivity caused by presenteeism. Most countries in the world have a public sickness benefit program, but South Korea is an exception, with neither legal paid sick leave nor a sickness benefit. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and a series of large-scale outbreaks in workplaces, the social discourse on the “right to rest” when sick has grown rapidly. In July 2020, the government announced ‘Comprehensive Plan for the Korean New Deal’, which included a plan to introduce a sickness benefit program. Accordingly, the pilot project was launched in July 2022 in six districts. With the hope that the sickness benefit program will contribute to promoting health equity and reducing social inequality, we would like to take a look at the points that must be considered and supplemented when implementing the system.