Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang Province launch unified labor market initiative

Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang Province are joining forces to build a single unified employment zone that transcends administrative boundaries.

The initiative centers on the three regions' core industries — shipbuilding, automobiles and machinery parts — and aims to connect talent and companies at a metropolitan scale while jointly supporting young workers from initial recruitment through long-term settlement.

The Ministry of Employment and Labor said Monday it will hold the launch ceremony for the "Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang Gwangyeok-eum Project," a cross-regional employment linkage initiative, at BEXCO in Busan on Tuesday, together with the three local governments.

The Gwangyeok-eum Project consolidates employment policies that had previously been managed separately by individual local governments into a single metropolitan-level framework. It pools resources from metropolitan authorities to support job programs centered on each region's strategic industries, with the goal of attracting workers from outside the zone and stemming population outflows. This year, three regions were selected: the Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang area, the Daegu-North Gyeongsang Province area and the Chungcheong region.

The Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang project is built around three pillars: talent linkage, settlement linkage and future linkage. The talent linkage pillar focuses on drawing young workers from outside the region and encouraging local youth to stay in long-term employment. The settlement linkage pillar connects Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang Province into a single employment and lifestyle zone through commuting support and integrated job placement services.

The future linkage pillar will pursue joint research and development and supply chain cooperation among companies through a "3T Cooperation Partnership," as well as training key personnel under the "MEGA-AX" program to support the AI transformation of the manufacturing sector.

The central and local governments envision linking Busan's port infrastructure, Ulsan's industrial base and South Gyeongsang Province's manufacturing capacity into a single labor market. The core aim goes beyond matching companies with workers within individual localities — it is to simultaneously promote cross-regional labor mobility and industrial cooperation.

A "Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang Gwangyeok-eum Job Fair" will also be held alongside the launch ceremony, bringing together leading companies and job seekers from the shipbuilding, automotive and machinery parts sectors across the three regions to provide employment opportunities that cross local boundaries.

Also opening the same day at the same venue is the "2026 Maritime and Fisheries Job Fair," organized in connection with the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries' relocation to Busan. The plan is to broaden the scope of cross-regional hiring by bringing in companies and institutions from the maritime and fisheries sector alongside the region's major manufacturers.

"Busan's ports, Ulsan's industries and South Gyeongsang Province's manufacturing base have long sustained one another as a single southeastern economic community," Deputy Minister of Employment and Labor Kwon Chang-jun said. "Through the Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang Gwangyeok-eum Project, I hope we can lay a foundation for a leap forward — pooling regional resources beyond administrative and geographic constraints into a single living zone and a single employment zone to create quality jobs."

He added that the ministry would spare no effort to continuously generate quality jobs for young people in the region's core industries, including shipbuilding, automobiles, machinery parts manufacturing and the maritime and fisheries sector.