ARIRANG NEWS 18:00
Good evening... it′s Saturday the second of May... you are tuned in to our SIX PM newscast coming to you from Arirang′s News Center in Seoul.
It′s very good to have you with us.
I′m Mark Broome.
Parliament agrees on revised pension reform plan for public workers
Our top story this evening...
Eight months after starting talks on the sensitive issue of reforming the pension system for civil servants,... a deal has been struck.
With Korea′s rapidly aging population,... parliament was left with no choice but to make public sector workers pay more,... but receive less after they retire.
Song Ji-sun starts us off.
It has been in the works for a while,... but on Saturday, the National Assembly finally agreed on a plan to reform the pension system for public sector workers.
Public workers will see their monthly insurance premiums rise by an average of 30 percent but the pension payouts will be cut by an average of ten percent over the next 20 years.
That means a public worker who served 30-years and received a monthly salary of three-thousand U.S. dollars... will now pay 250 dollars a month in pension contributions instead of the current 200 dollars.
Once they retire,... they will get 150 dollars less than now... at around 15-hundred dollars a month.
Under the revised plan, more than three-hundred billion dollars will be saved over the next 70 years.
The main opposition party has also agreed to allocate 20 percent of the saved amount to the National Pension Service... to supplement a pension plan for the general public and the less privileged.
With Korea′s society aging fast,... the public workers′ pension would have been on track to hit an annual deficit of ten billion dollars by 2025... and over three billion dollars of taxpayers′ money was to be poured in to foot that bill, if this reform had not been agreed.
The leaders of the ruling and opposition parties will fine-tune the details over the next few days... to have the bill approved at a parliamentary session on Wednesday.
Song Ji-sun, Arirang News.
Activists want compensation for Korean victims of 1945 atomic bombings
Taking their case to the United Nations for the first time,... Korean activists and survivors are saying it′s high time Japan apologize to and compensate Koreans who were taken to Japan as forced laborers and fell victim to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The demand was made at the Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty taking place on the the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Seventy-two-year-old Shim Jin-tae ,.. who was a toddler living with his father at the time of the bombings,... said most Koreans who were in Japan at that time were taken there to work against their will.
He said the Japanese government must apologize and compensate the victims and the United States should also take responsibility for dropping the atomic bombs.
One-hundred thousand Koreans were affected by the bombin
