Korean Company Pays $75,000 per Baby

A construction company in South Korea gives every employee who has a baby 100 million won, about $75,000, which is over a year's salary for many of its workers. When someone at the company, Booyoung, has a baby, its chairman, Lee Joong-keun, personally wires the money all at once during the company's New Year ceremony. The payout is about five times as much as the South Korean government gives a family for the first two years of a baby's life. Since February 5th, 2024, Lee has made payments for 134 babies, some of which had been born in 2021. Booyoung says the policy is working: employee births rose from an average of 23 a year between 2021 and 2023 to 28 in 2024. But the number of births in 2021, 2022, and 2023 was 15, 23, and 31, respectively, all before the cash incentive was announced. In fact, there were three fewer births in 2024 than in 2023. And, of course, pregnancy takes around nine months, so most of the babies born in 2024 were conceived before the policy was announced. The first year that the incentive might have had any effect was 2025, when there were 36 births, five more than in 2023. Booyoung has never revealed its total number of employees, so it's unclear if an increase of five births is significant. Nonetheless, Lee still says that the payments increased births "by more than 10%." Kim Yoon-ki, one of the employees to receive the money, recounted seeing eight zeros in her bank account. "Even looking at it I couldn't believe it," she said. Her friends started asking, "How do you get into your company? Do you hire people switching from other jobs?" They wanted to work at Booyoung, and they weren't alone. When the company restarted hiring, in April of 2025, it said that there were 180 applicants for every opening, up from 10% a year earlier. This happened while employees rated the company 1.8 out of five on Blind, an app with anonymous but verified workplace reviews. (Construction companies get an average rating of 3.1 on the app.) One reviewer wrote, "They give 100 million won so you'll have lots of kids, then post you somewhere with no warning, so families have to live apart." A former Booyoung Housing employee wrote on the review website JobPlanet: "People rushed in after the news stories and all left within a year."