There are people paying their parents' hospital bills while putting together their children's tuition. No law currently names them as a target of policy. A policy roundtable held on June 29 in the fourth conference room of the National Assembly Members' Office Building was the starting point for debate on enacting a framework act for the middle-aged to fill that blank. The roundtable, arranged by the office of Rep. Park Ju-min of the Democratic Party of Korea, brought together officials from the Presidential Committee on Ageing Society and Population Policy, Gyeonggi Province, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the Korea Labor Force Development Institute for the Aged, and the Seoul 50 Plus Center Council.
Lining up the current laws by age brings the blank into view. The Child Welfare Act covers those under 18, the Framework Act on Juveniles those aged 9 to 24, and the Framework Act on Youth those aged 19 to 34. Then the Elderly Welfare Act takes those aged 65 and over. No framework act addresses head-on the lives of people from 35 to 64.
In the field of employment, these people carry a different name. The Act on Prohibition of Age Discrimination in Employment and Elderly Employment Promotion defines those aged 55 and over as elderly and those aged 50 to under 55 as semi-elderly. It is the story of a person who leaves their main workplace at 49 and becomes a "semi-elderly" on paper the following year.
The scale is not small. As of 2024, the population aged 40 to 64 was 20.031 million, or 40.3% of the total population. That means four in ten people fall within this range. Even so, no law has ever grouped this population as a single policy unit.
In the supplementary survey on the older population in the Economically Active Population Survey, the average retirement age was recorded at 49.4. The statutory retirement age is 60, but the actual exit comes about ten years earlier. Between retirement and the start of National Pension payments, an income gap of more than 10 years opens up. During that period, the burden of parents' care costs and children's school fees continues.
Finding work again does not restore the conditions. The share of those whose wages fell after changing jobs was 40.8% among people in their 50s and 44.6% among those in their 60s, above the all-age average of 36.4%. That is to say, in close to half of cases the wage at the workplace they return to after enduring a period without income is lower than before. Existing measures such as unemployment benefits and the National Pension make up part of the income, but support for training to change occupations or for reviving severed networks is not as fine-grained.
The bill being prepared sets the range of the middle-aged at 40 and over and under 65. The state and local governments would draw up a framework plan for middle-aged policy every five years and, every three years, survey employment, housing, health, financial status, and digital capability. For bodies to handle implementation, a Middle-Aged Policy Coordination Committee under the Prime Minister and a Korea Institute for Middle-Age Life Design under the Minister of Health and Welfare were proposed. Support for life transition planning, employment security, middle-aged friendly working environments, protection of rights and interests and improved awareness, digital capability, health promotion and psychological support, and community participation were included.
The survey every three years has meaning in itself. At present the state cannot even answer how many people carry both support for parents and care for children. No budget is allocated to a population that has not been counted, and a plan without a budget is renewed only on paper every five years. Whether the law becomes an empty shell depends on how finely the survey is designed.
The timing of the bill's introduction and its provisions have not been fixed. How far this debate goes will become clear from what the ministries taking part put forward at the next stage. One certain change has come about. At the roundtable, government ministries, local governments, and groups representing those directly concerned sat down at the same time and began to name the lives of the middle-aged as a single policy target.
