Family Care Leave · Sick Leave
Family Care Leave & Sick Leave
What is family care leave?
- Family care is a statutory program; personal sick leave falls under company policy
- Define documentation standards and when long-term illness converts to a separate leave type
- Route work-related injuries through the workers’ compensation process
What a policy really changes is 'who decides.' With one in place, taking three days off for a parent’s surgery is handled through a standard form and clear requirements. Without one, the team lead’s discretion and mood that day set the standard. The moment one employee uses annual leave and another is marked absent without pay for the same reason, employees learn to rely on individual managers rather than the system. The real value of formalizing a policy is not adding benefits but removing this arbitrariness.
The two are fundamentally different. Family care leave of absence and family care leave are grounded in law, so a request that meets the requirements must in principle be granted, and adverse treatment for applying for or using them is prohibited. Sick leave for an employee’s own illness, by contrast, is not a statutory obligation unless the illness is work-related. Whether it is paid or unpaid, how many days are allowed per year, and after how many days a medical certificate is required all depend on your rules of employment. Recovery from a work-related injury or illness is a separate track that runs through the industrial accident insurance process, and long-term illness needs a design that converts it into a leave of absence rather than sick leave. If these four are lumped into a single sentence, they will inevitably clash in practice.
The most common misconception is that 'sick leave isn't in the law, so we don't need it.' Not creating it doesn't make it disappear; it spills over into annual leave. The same path repeats: an employee takes two weeks for surgery and recovery, burns through all their annual leave, goes the remaining six months without a day off, and eventually quits. Another is verbally rejecting a family care leave request as 'not workable given business needs.' Blocking leave for a reason the law does not recognize as an exception is where disputes begin. Companies also often define family narrowly as spouse and children, and miss cases involving parents or grandparents. Detailed criteria may be amended, so check the latest statutes before revising your policy.
Jongmu KimSpecialist in corporate talent development and job competency building
Hwi KimCEO of HRDIST & talent development system consultantKorea’s Act on Equal Employment and Support for Work-Family Reconciliation provides for family care leave of absence and family care leave. Sick leave for an employee’s own illness is not a statutory obligation unless the illness is work-related. Instead, it is set by the company’s rules of employment and similar policies.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a manufacturing parts supplier with 140 employees, had no sick leave clause at all in its work rules. In 2023, six employees were out for two weeks or more due to cancer surgery, caring for a parent, or a car accident. Each case was handled differently, with annual leave or unpaid absence, and two of them left within three months of returning. The HR manager told the CEO, "This isn't about compassion. It's about having no policy," and that kicked off a four-month overhaul.
- When the HR manager pulled the last two years of extended absences into Excel (17 cases), the pattern was clear: for the same reason, 'caring for a parent,' some departments treated it as paid leave and others as unpaid absence, and Production Team 2 forced employees to use up annual leave. The table went straight to the executive meeting.
- With advice from a labor attorney, the company wrote the statutory requirements and application procedures for family care leave and leave of absence straight into its rules. Separately, it designed sick leave as 10 paid days per year, then up to 20 unpaid days. When the CEO asked, "What would 10 paid days cost us in labor costs?", the team estimated about KRW 24 million (≈ US$18,000) per year.
- The documentation standard was split in two: a medical certificate for sick leave of 3 or more consecutive days, and just an application form for up to 2 days. This reflects feedback from shop-floor foremen that "getting a certificate for a single sick day costs more than it's worth."
- Illnesses exceeding the 20 unpaid sick days convert automatically to up to 6 months of medical leave of absence, and the rules state that employees return to their original position. Work-related injuries and illnesses are split into a separate clause that starts with an industrial accident claim rather than sick leave, with the safety manager serving as the intake point.
- The company held two all-employee briefings and put a one-page application form on the first screen of its groupware. In the first year, 31 employees used sick leave, but the average was only 4.2 days. Resignations within a year of returning, among those absent for two weeks or more, fell from 2 the previous year to 0.