방송산업의 노동집약적 원가 구조로의 변화: 방송의 예능프로그램 시장을 중심으로

Abstract

Despite the claimed necessity or what it represent politically, the introduction of 52 hour-workweek seems likely to aggravate the already adverse environment for the Korean broadcast industry. The conventional broadcasting market has been contracting continuously and fast in recent years, affected largely by the aggressively expansion of new forms of platforms. It seems widely-agreed that the 52-hour workweek will result in the betterment of working conditions. The introduction of it, however, as it happens in the midst of both the decline in the industry's competitiveness and the consequent weakening of the overall industry's financial prowess, could lead to a rise in production costs, a decrease in the actual total income of individual staffs, a decrease in the number of programs and the consequent sharp increase in reruns, and so on. Faced with these issues, two kinds of working-level decisions would be made at companies to expedite the production: a simple quantitative increase in the labor input or the employment of betterskilled/experienced labor for efficiency. These reaction should eventually make the industry highly labor cost-intensive and skew opportunities toward ‘A-list staffs’ more and more, which do not seem to be part of the expectations policymakers had. There is an urgent need for policy supplementation to alleviate discretionary work-hour system.