SEOUL -- The prolonged novel coronavirus outbreak has dealt a body blow to the labor market in South Korea, causing the number of people in paid employment to plunge by nearly 1 million in January alone.
The current unemployment crisis is the worst since South Korea's financial crunch of 1997, President Moon Jae-in said Monday, pledging that his administration would take all possible measures to cope with it. But government-led efforts to create jobs have their limits.
