Is workplace bullying in Korea different or worse than in other countries?

by Jacco Zwetsloot

At the beginning of July, CNN’s website carried a story headlined “As Korean employees return to the office, so does 'gapjil' workplace harassment.” It reported the concerning statistic that according to an online survey of 1,000 workers carried out in Korea in June, almost 30% of them had suffered some form of workplace harassment or bullying in the last year. A similar survey carried out in March had a result of 23.5%. This suggests that as people in Korea cease working from home and return to life in their traditional workplace, harassment by workmates or bosses has become more frequent. Furthermore, many of the survey respondents reported that their mental health had suffered as a result of such treatment at work.

This is a serious issue and must not be trivialized. Abuse of power and workplace bullying are harmful to productivity, worker health, and the creation of a sound and happy workplace. The question that niggled at this writer is this: is workplace harassment a uniquely Korean thing? By using “gapjil” in the title, CNN seemed to imply that there was something specifically Korean about the phenomenon.

These days, as Korean music, TV series, films and more have become noticed on the global cultural stage, we have seen more words be borrowed from Korean into English. Whereas 20 years ago there was barely a person who hadn’t been to Seoul who knew what bulgogi or bibimbap were, now you can find the names of Korean dishes romanized - rather than translated - even in not-specifically-Korean restaurants in large Western cities.?

Then there was that episode of “West Wing” that dealt with (and was titled) “Han” after the Korean word for a long pent-up feeling of resentment, grief and/or grudge. This is not a uniquely Korean sentiment, but some people like to imagine that it is, because it seems to encapsulate the suffering of the Korean people broadly speaking, and the travails of a given Korean family more specifically.?

In 2021, Euny Hong, author of the 2014 bestseller The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation is Conquering the World through Pop Culture, had another hit on her hands when Penguin published her The Power of Nunchi: The Korean Sixth Sense For Winning Friends And Influencing People. Nunchi is a great concept, and anyone who has been in Korea longer than a few months will have learned it means a reading of a situation to determine what is going on and what kind of behavior or demeanor is called on or appropriate. English doesn’t have a single, pithy word or phrase that captures the concept entirely, but that doesn’t mean that the idea itself is Korea-specific.

The same is true for jeong, heung, and surely most human emotions or experiences. So what about gapjil? Is workplace bullying or harassment, or abuse of power, something that happens more in Korea than in other countries? The survey cited by CNN was conducted within Korea by a domestic civic group designed to fight such treatment, so it did not make comparisons to results in other countries. It seems logical that, as people return to work globally after the pandemic, incidences of things that happen within workplaces - both good and bad things, for example office romances, accidents, and also bullying, harassment - will likewise increase. Do we need a special word to make the Korean version seem any different or worse?