A, who works at an auto parts manufacturer in Daejeon with around 500 employees, has been unable to shake off a sense of unease these days. Starting about four years ago, the company stopped backfilling positions when people quit. It then merged departments, and recently robots have begun replacing workers one by one. Materials that people used to carry are now handled by autonomous mobile robots. Machines have also started taking over tasks such as wrapping plastic around empty boxes and stacking them.

With the 52-hour workweek cap, overtime and weekend work have disappeared, but an indefinable mood has spread through the company. A said, “As headcount has shrunk, collaboration between departments has actually become more difficult,” adding, “The tendency to protect one’s own area of work has grown stronger.” A added, “Since last year, the company has been advising employees with poor performance evaluations to resign.”

The changes A feels are also borne out in the numbers. In the fourth quarter of last year, new manufacturing hires fell to their lowest level since statistics began being compiled in 2018. In particular, new manufacturing jobs for people in their 20s are declining rapidly, prompting analyses that young people’s ‘first jobs’ on the factory floor are quickly disappearing.

An analysis by the Kyunghyang Shinmun on the 25th of the Ministry of Data and Statistics’ administrative statistics on wage-and-salaried jobs found that new manufacturing hires in the fourth quarter of last year totaled 766,000.

This is the smallest number since 2018, when the relevant statistics were first compiled. The share of new hires in total jobs itself hit an all-time low of 17.8%, making it difficult to explain the decline solely through demographic changes.

The magnitude of the decline also far exceeded the all-industry average. Over the same period, new hires across all industries fell from 5,807,000 to 5,629,000, down 3.1%, whereas in manufacturing they fell from 845,000 to 766,000, a 9.3% decrease. The decline in new manufacturing hires was about three times larger than the overall average, showing that the employment slump in manufacturing is deepening more markedly than in other sectors.

By age group, those in their 20s were hit the hardest. In the fourth quarter of last year, new manufacturing hires for those age 20 and under numbered 214,000, down 13.7% from 248,000 a year earlier. In particular, the share of new manufacturing hires accounted for by those 20 and under was 36.8%, down 3.7 percentage points from 40.5% a year earlier. Not only are manufacturing jobs themselves shrinking, but the share of new hires made up by people in their 20s is also falling, meaning people in their 20s are losing their place.

In their 30s (-9.4%), 40s (-8.0%), and 50s (-7.2%), new manufacturing hires also declined across the board. While new hires for those 60 and older increased in the overall job market amid population aging, in manufacturing alone they fell by 2.4% year on year, confirming a manufacturing employment cold snap spanning all age groups.

The decline in new manufacturing hiring is attributed to labor substitution stemming from the spread of automation and to the restructuring of the industrial landscape toward sectors, such as semiconductors, that have low employment multipliers.

As robots and automated equipment replace simple, repetitive processes, both the number and the profile of workers needed on production lines have changed. In the past, manufacturing hired high school graduates and new entrants into front-line production roles, where they built up skills over time, but as automation spreads these ‘entry-level’ jobs themselves are decreasing. The trend is toward replacement by robots and machines. Instead, only skilled technical roles or equipment maintenance and management positions that require human judgment are surviving. Analyses suggest the entry barrier to manufacturing has grown even higher for people in their 20s seeking their first job.

Polarization within manufacturing is also cited as a factor behind the decline in new hiring. In the booming semiconductor industry, operations revolve around a small number of highly skilled workers, so the employment effect is relatively limited. In the fourth quarter of last year, new hires in the semiconductor industry totaled 28,000, the same level as the previous year.

By contrast, job decreases were pronounced in more labor-intensive sectors. New hires in auto parts manufacturing fell from 60,000 to 55,000 in a year; in other fabricated metal products manufacturing, from 52,000 to 47,000; and in plastics products manufacturing, from 39,000 to 36,000.

Noh Seri, a senior research fellow at the Labor Research Institute, said in a report titled ‘AI-based Manufacturing Innovation and Employment,’ “We need to expand hiring-linked training, project-based work, and conversion-type internships that enable young people at companies adopting AI in manufacturing to accumulate on-site experience, in order to mitigate the ‘break in first entry’ that arises during technological transitions.”