“A trip to Japan on unemployment benefits? I’ll take a photo for you once you get a job”... The young people who infuriated Kang Leo

[Financial News] An anecdote about celebrity chef Kang Leo, 50, once refusing a photo request from young people who had traveled to Japan after receiving unemployment benefits has only recently come to light. 
According to industry sources on the 27th, Chef Kang recounted an experience he had in Japan in a recently released video on the YouTube channel Human Story. “I went to Japan, and the young people next to me were talking about how they’d ‘come here to have fun on unemployment benefits’ and asking, ‘How much did you get? I hear you can get more.’ It made me angry,” he recalled.
He continued, “Later, those young people came up and asked, ‘Chef, could you take a picture?’ So I turned them down, saying, ‘I’ll take one when you get a job.’ I was angry because they had come to have fun on taxpayers’ money.”
Chef Kang also continued to speak bluntly about the employment problems facing young people. Recalling how he moved to London during the financial crisis and learned to cook while working 18 hours a day at a famous restaurant, he stressed, “They say it’s hard and there’s no way forward, but how can there be no work? Just look at a pork bone stew restaurant—there’s so much work to do. If you can’t find a job, they tell you to come work there. There’s no easy work anywhere.”
As Chef Kang’s remarks sparked a public debate, criticism has spread online over unemployment-benefit claims that stray from the program’s original purpose of helping recipients find new jobs. In particular, public anger appears to be growing as concrete statistics confirm cases of people fraudulently collecting benefits while staying overseas during the benefit period, or abusing the system by repeatedly quitting and returning to work.
According to data submitted to the Ministry of Employment and Labor by Kim Wi-sang, a People Power Party lawmaker on the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea’s Climate, Energy, Environment and Labor Committee, the number of recipients caught fraudulently claiming benefits among those with records showing they were overseas on their unemployment-benefit certification date surged 57.0% in a single year, from 1,359 in 2024 to 2,134 in 2025. A common method is for recipients staying overseas to hand over digital certificates and other credentials to family members or acquaintances in South Korea, who then check in on their behalf and register false job-search activities.
The problem of repeat claims is also serious. According to data from the office of Kim Sohee, a People Power Party lawmaker on the same committee, 113,000 people received unemployment benefits at least three times within five years last year, with total payouts of about 599.754 billion won (an average of about 5.3 million won per person). Around 60,000 people a year also repeatedly leave and return to the same workplace under the guise of an employer-recommended resignation or the expiration of a contract.
The inversion under the current labor standards and employment insurance system—where the monthly minimum unemployment benefit of about 1.98 million won exceeds the monthly take-home pay at the minimum wage of about 1.94 million won—has also been cited as a major factor that dampens the incentive to work and fuels the so-called “syrup benefits” controversy.
Kim Wi-sang said, “The fact that cases of fraudulent claims by people staying overseas have actually increased despite the authorities’ inspections shows that there are still gaps in oversight.” He added, “We need to quickly introduce proactive monitoring measures, not just catch fraud after the fact, so that unemployment benefits reach job seekers who genuinely need help finding new work.”

Meanwhile, the government is stepping up efforts to adjust the minimum benefit amount and strengthen monitoring for fraudulent claims, including revising the basis for calculating unemployment benefits from the current “seven days a week” to “six days a week,” in order to address the inversion between unemployment benefits and the minimum wage and prevent moral hazard among recipients.


[email protected] Moon Young-jin Reporter