The government has today enforced a law that allows franchises and contractors to charge more for services and products provided to conglomerates, to help meet rising labor costs.
This comes amid a heated debate over the minimum wage for next year,... which a government committee set at eight-thousand-three-hundred-fifty won.
Labor forces say it's too low,.... local businesses say otherwise.
We have our Oh Soo-young in the studio to help us break down this ongoing debate.
Soo-young, many are questioning whether the minimum wage hike will do more harm than good.

That's right. It was President Moon's election pledge to raise the hourly wage floor to ten-thousand won, or almost nine dollars per hour, by 2020.
That's why we had a whopping 16-point-four percent increase this year,... the highest rate in 17 years... and now the proposed ten-point-nine percent rise to seven-dollars-forty cents.
The wage hike is intended to stabilize income for small businesses owners and workers without full-time jobs.
However, these are the very people concerned it could all backfire.

Twenty-seven year-old Lim Seung-heon has been working part time jobs for the last seven years,... mostly at restaurants and convenience stores.
The 16-point-4 percent minimum wage hike this year meant he was taking home an extra 90 dollars a month compared to last year,... but he says the raise came at a price.

"Some employers expect much more from us. More input. Looking more cheerful in front of customers. After the wage hike, my former employer at a convenience store explicitly asked two of us to cover work that four people used to do. I had no choice but to accept the situation while looking for other jobs."

At the same time, Lim says he understands his former employer's concerns.
Small businesses owners who mostly rely on part time workers have opposed the government's recent wage hike decision, say they're finding it hard to keep their businesses afloat.
Half of them are making less than 17-hundred dollars a month, according to a recent survey on almost 950 convenience store owners.

"I don't know what I'm going to do because I can't possibly cut more jobs. I've already been taking over my workers' shifts. I work about ten to twelve hours a day now. Fourteen some days. Many of us convenience store owners are barely making as much as our part time employees."

The same survey shows 30 percent of convenience store workers have taken on about five hours of extra shifts a week to keep costs down.
Fifty percent have taken on two to five extra hours.
So now, four in ten store owners work more than twelve hours a day.
Some have decided to simply close their shops earlier than they used to.
But closing early means there's less money coming in,...and fewer jobs for part time workers.

"The profits of small businesses, at least 20% have taken a decline in profits and about a 30% decline in general sales. The decline in general sales is mainly because shop owners decided