Weekly holiday allowance refers to the money that an employee receives for paid weekly holidays. The company is obliged to give workers who have worked more than 주휴수당 15 hours per week an average of at least one paid holiday per week in order to relieve fatigue from work. Today, we will look at the payment standards for weekly holiday pay, the calculation method, and points to be aware of.
Overview of Weekly Holiday Allowance
Article 55 (Holidays) of the Labor Standards Act stipulates that the company shall give an average of at least one paid holiday per week to workers who have worked the prescribed number of working days in a week. However, one day’s wages must be paid.
Therefore, in general, companies employing full-time workers set Sunday as a paid holiday, and Saturdays are often closed as unpaid days off.
Weekly Holiday Allowance Payment Standard
For salaried employees, vacation pay is usually included in their pay. For part-timers who work on an hourly wage, it is common to calculate and pay weekly holiday allowances in addition to the wages for the actual hours worked. This is the basic standard for weekly holiday pay. Workplaces with fewer than 5 employees must also pay weekly holiday pay. In the case of workers, all three of the following conditions must be met in order to be paid.
1. For workers who work 15 hours or more per week
If the actual working hours excluding breaks in the employment contract are 15 hours or more per week, it is subject to the weekly holiday allowance payment standard. If you work less than 15 hours a week, you are not eligible.
2. All employees must go to work during the week
You must go to work for all the working days indicated in the employment contract. Even if you are late or leave early, if you go to work, you are considered to have worked.
3. Payment can be made only if continuous work is scheduled
If the next week’s work is scheduled to continue, it will be paid as a weekly holiday allowance.
In addition, the criteria for payment of holiday pay under the following conditions are summarized:
a. The week in which annual leave is used is recognized as a paid holiday. 쉬운남자
b. The week in which menstrual leave is used is unpaid leave or work recognition
c. Weeks used for unpaid leave are treated as absenteeism: No weekly holiday pay
In summary, it is determined that workers who work more than 15 hours a week are given one day off to relieve fatigue from work. And this week holiday is guaranteed as a paid holiday under domestic law. Therefore, the company must calculate the daily wage (daily rate) for a normal working day on a weekly holiday and pay it separately from the weekly wage, and notify the worker in writing of the fact of the payment in advance. Since there is no specific day of the week stipulated by the law, it does not have to be a Sunday. Depending on the type of work, a weekday may be a weekly holiday.
Weekly holiday allowance payment standards for workplaces with fewer than 5 employees
In principle, this applies to workplaces with 5 or more workers at all times. Therefore, workplaces with fewer than five full-time workers are exempted from the Labor Standards Act. However, even if the number of full-time workers is less than 5, some provisions of the Labor Standards Act may still apply, and one of them is weekly holiday pay.
Changes since August 2021
Previously, you could receive it when you were scheduled to work, but now you can receive it even after you leave the company. For example, if the weekly holiday falls on a Sunday, even if the employee quits the company on the following Monday after completing all prescribed work (Monday to Friday), it is included in the weekly holiday allowance payment standard. However, if you leave on a Saturday, you will not be paid.
Part-time Work Week Holiday Allowance Standards
In the case of a part-time job, the working hours specified in the contract must be at least 15 hours per week. In addition, all working days must be open. Even if you are late or leave early, you are counted as working days as long as you go to work. Working more than 15 hours per week is based on the working hours specified in the labor contract, and less than 15 hours per week is not included in the weekly holiday allowance payment standard. You don’t have to pay. 
In this case, when the specified working days are completed, it means that all working days specified in the labor contract have been worked. If an employee works on both Mondays and Fridays, 5 days are counted as the prescribed working days. If you are contracted in this form on a part-time basis, 3 days a week is considered as a fixed working day.
Summary of calculation methods
Weekly holiday pay is calculated simply by dividing the number of hours worked in a week by 40 and multiplying 8 hours by the hourly wage. The hourly wage and weekly holiday pay are combined to calculate the monthly wage. For example below,
The calculation of the pay for workers who work 30 hours a week this year is as follows.
30 hours (working hours) ÷ 40 × 8 hours × 9,160 won (hourly wage) = 54,960 won
In this way, 54,960 won is an additional amount that can be received and is equivalent to about 6 hours of salary. Be sure to check that your paycheck includes that amount.
How to get rid of vacation pay?
The minimum wage is already approaching 10,000 won, and there are arguments that the weekly holiday allowance should be abolished for reasons such as whether it is not a direct reward for work. Originally, vacation pay was introduced with the enactment of the Labor Standards Act in 1953, after the Korean War. It was started with the purpose of protecting low-wage workers suffering from long hours of work, and it is a system that guarantees one day off a week and pays it in addition to that.
As it has a long history, the current situation has side effects that deteriorate the quality of employment, such as an increase in the number of very short-term workers as small business owners and companies that have to pay allowances split their jobs to avoid this. In 2019, he even proposed a proposal to abolish holiday pay.
Side Effect
In order not to be included in the weekly holiday allowance payment standard, the theory of abolition is emerging because there are not many side effects of employers employing split employment, which is used only by workers who work less than 15 hours per week. However, this is not as simple as you might think. The reason is that it is difficult to reach a social consensus because simply removing the holiday pay will cut the wages of most workers.
However, they said that we would increase the basic hourly wage by the amount corresponding to the weekly holiday allowance so that the total amount is similar. Since the various allowances calculated as hourly wages (overtime allowance, overtime allowance, annual leave allowance, etc.) will increase. Wherever we are in the middle, it is a system in which the good and the bad are inevitably different for each workplace and employment type, depending on the proportion of allowances in wages.