At the age of 69, Kim Jung-mi holds three jobs: she spends three hours getting a 2-year old home from kindergarten every weekday for $9 per hour, then washes vegetables at a store that sells kimchi. Occasionally, she walks her neighbor's dog.
That kind of gig work among elderly people has helped South Korea to log a record-setting run of low unemployment through February, at 2.7%, with almost half of the job increases driven by people 60 and older.
Although the drift to low-paid, part-time work is a global phenomenon, it has put South Korea at the top of OECD's scale measuring the temporary employment rate for people 65 and older: 69% of that age group is working somewhere, far higher than 38.1% in Japan and 13.2% for the peer group average.