Growth without jobs

The core of the claim holds: recent expansion in the Korean tech economy has been driven largely by capital-intensive sectors such as semiconductors, AI infrastructure and data centers. These sectors generate high output value but employ relatively few workers compared with their revenue scale, meaning headline growth does not translate proportionally into new hiring.

Labor's slice shrinks

The second part of the claim — that labor's share of income is declining — was also found to be broadly consistent with the evidence. As companies channel investment into equipment, fabs and AI computing capacity, a growing portion of income accrues to capital rather than wages. The review found this trend present across the sources examined, though the magnitude of the decline varies by sector and measurement method.

Caveats

Some nuances temper a fully affirmative judgment. Job creation is not uniformly weak across all segments of the AI economy, and labor-share figures can shift depending on how self-employment income and depreciation are counted. These measurement sensitivities mean the decline in labor's share, while directionally supported, should not be read as uniform or precisely quantified across the economy.

Taken together, the claim that growth produces only modest job gains while labor's share of income falls is supported by the weight of the evidence, with minor qualifications on scope and measurement — making the verdict Mostly True.