Why Korean Company Dinners Are Hard to Refuse — Where the Law and the Custom Come Apart

Company dinners in Korea usually get told as culture: the angle of the bottle, the two hands under the glass, the head turned away when you drink.

Korean statistics file the same scene under a different heading. In 2025 the Ministry of Employment and Labor logged 16,373 workplace harassment complaints, and pressuring someone to attend a company dinner sits on the list of recognised complaint types. What reads as custom is classified as a dispute.

Yet the same system refuses to count that dinner as working time. This piece opens up the gap between those two facts.

At a glance

Rows four and five collide. The hours do not count as work, but an injury sustained during them can count as a workplace injury. Two different yardsticks rest on the same evening, and that mismatch is the real reason the invitation is hard to decline.

An eightfold rise in complaints is not the dinner getting worse

Read only the numbers and Korean workplaces appear to have deteriorated sharply in six years: 2,130 in 2019, 11,038 in 2023, 13,601 in 2024, 16,373 in 2025.

Most of the increase comes from the rule existing. The workplace harassment provision took effect in July 2019. Before that the same events had nowhere to be filed. A complaint count tracks what became reportable, not what became common.

The numbers grew because the behaviour got a name, not because it got worse.

The recognised categories widened too. Alongside forced attendance, verbal abuse and exclusion, the official examples now include personal errands, cutting one person out of meetings, humiliating someone in public, and assigning only one employee obsolete equipment. Korean media has reported a case where an employee was repeatedly told to drink and sing at a dinner run by the company head, to the point of needing psychiatric treatment.

Workplaces employing many foreign nationals get inspected separately. In April and September 2025 the ministry ran intensive inspections at 196 vulnerable sites, finding 846 violations across 182 of them. Unpaid wages surfaced at 123 workplaces, covering 2,742 workers and roughly 1.7 billion won. The payslip deserves attention before the dinner does.

The same dinner is not working time, yet can be an industrial accident

Korean law handles the company dinner along two separate tracks.

First, it is not working time. The ministry treats it as a gathering "unrelated to the provision of labour, intended to raise morale and strengthen cohesion and fellowship." Even if an employer verbally pressures attendance, that alone does not convert it into working time. Working time means hours spent under the employer's direction and supervision with your labour at their disposal, and a dinner is held not to meet that definition.

Second, an injury there can qualify as an industrial accident. Courts weigh who organised the event, what its purpose was, whether attendance was effectively compulsory, who paid, and whether the employee stayed on the ordinary course of the evening. Where the company organises it, pays for it, and attendance is effectively required, work-relatedness can be recognised for a first round and a second alike. The Supreme Court has accepted a claim in a case where an employee died from excessive drinking at a group dinner.

But the two rulings are not a contradiction. One asks whether more wages are owed. The other asks whether the company bears responsibility. Different questions can carry different answers. The difficulty lands on the person in between: your time is not counted as yours, while the risk is treated as the company's, and finding grounds to refuse gets unusually hard in that state.

Nunchi is not a personality trait — it is information stored in seating and order

Translating nunchi as "reading the room" carries about half of it. Inside a Korean workplace, nunchi is closer to where information is kept than to a feeling. Unstated rules ride on seating and sequence, and the ability to read them is what gets called nunchi.

The things to read are fairly fixed. Who takes the head seat. Who lifts a glass first. Who has not stood up yet. Who pays. Those four settle almost the entire hierarchy of the evening, and that hierarchy runs straight into the language too — the point where formal and casual speech switch is a declaration about the relationship, and it is the layer subtitles never manage to carry across.

Job titles work the same way. The ladder from daeri to gwajang to bujang is not a tenure marker but a record of who may instruct whom, and drama scenes that blend corporate rank with dynastic family address compress that structure into shorthand. Knowing how the word chaebol behaves in drama versus a real org chart cuts down the confusion in an actual office.

The custom itself is already shifting. In employee surveys, 78% named a good lunch gathering as an appropriate format against 47% for evening drinks. Seventy-one percent reported stress from company dinners, and the leading reason was "getting home late" at 26%. The complaint is about the hour, not the alcohol.

What diverges from Vietnamese labour law is not hours but how the day ends

Compare the statutory numbers and the two countries look close.

Base hours are actually shorter in Korea. What differs is the unit the ceiling is counted in. Vietnam manages an annual total, so a busy season can absorb the load; Korea sets a weekly ceiling, so exceeding it makes that specific week unlawful. Which is why Korean offices talk less about "how late tonight" and more about "how many hours are left this week."

And the working day ends differently. The structure in which the clock stops but the evening does not is the company dinner, and it appears on no statutory timetable. Set against a population map holding roughly 149,000 Vietnamese workers and 107,807 students in Korea, the number of people meeting that gap every week is not small.

Refusal is a sentence, not an attitude

"I can't come" on its own damages the relationship. Refusals that work in Korean offices usually have three parts: an expression of willingness, a concrete reason, and an offer of a next time.

• Stay for the first round and leave — the most widely accepted compromise. "I'll stay through the first round" is not a rude sentence
• Decide your drink in advance — health, medication and religious reasons are rarely pressed further. Accepting a glass without drinking it also passes at the table
• Propose a date yourself — the easiest way to make a refusal read as scheduling
• Document repeated pressure — date, place, wording, witnesses. Every complaint procedure starts from that record
• If you attend, stay on the ordinary route home — "ordinary course" is genuinely weighed in deciding employer control

What this means where you are

The system already owns a vocabulary for forced attendance. What is missing is the moment someone uses it at their own table. Those 16,373 complaints are the people who did. The tables where nobody did appear in no statistic at all.

Read next

• Vietnam is now Korea's top source of new arrivals — the numbers behind who is in this workplace
• Korean honorifics are not politeness — the layer that actually splits at the dinner table
• The word chaebol in Korean drama — another vocabulary for reading an org chart
• Why sikgu means the people you eat with — where shared eating gets translated into relationship
• How to check whether Korean cosmetics are genuine — the question that comes up outside the office

Sources

• Seoul Economic Daily — Workplace harassment complaints top 16,000 (Korean)
• Lawtimes — Ministry: company dinners are not counted as working time (Korean)
• Korea Easy Law — Criteria for recognising accidents as industrial accidents (Korean)
• Money Today — 846 violations found in inspections of vulnerable workplaces (Korean)
• Thu vien phap luat — Working hours under the Labour Code 2019 (Vietnamese)