Government moves to protect platform workers with new basic rights law

The government has moved to overhaul laws and regulations protecting the rights of platform workers, including delivery riders and domestic and care workers.

The push follows the International Labour Organization's adoption in June of a separate set of international labor standards for platform workers. In South Korea, enacting a basic rights law for all working people and expanding social insurance coverage have emerged as the central tasks.

The Ministry of Employment and Labor held a forum Tuesday at the Korea Federation of Banks building in Seoul titled "The Significance of the ILO Platform Labor Convention and Future Challenges." The event was organized to discuss the direction of domestic policy for protecting platform workers following the ILO's adoption of its Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy.

The platform labor convention the ILO adopted in June is significant as the first independent international labor standard dedicated to protecting platform workers. It responds to the spread of the platform economy, which has given rise to forms of work that are difficult to cover under the traditional employer-employee framework alone.

Nam Gung-jun, a researcher at the Korea Labor Institute who delivered the first presentation, identified the creation of a standalone international labor standard for platform workers as the convention's core significance. He said developing concrete protections by reforming domestic laws and systems to fit local conditions was important, noting that the convention allows countries flexibility to account for their own labor market and institutional circumstances.

The government's proposed Basic Act on the Rights of Working People was put forward as the primary domestic reform option. Park Gwi-cheon, a professor at Ewha Womans University, said existing laws alone have clear limits in covering the full range of new and emerging forms of work. She proposed that the most realistic path forward would be to use the basic rights act to establish a foundational framework of protections applicable regardless of employment type, while also reforming individual laws and systems — including expanding social insurance coverage.

Discussions linking the government's proposed basic rights act with the ILO platform labor convention are likely to gain momentum. Platform workers have long been at the center of debate over whether they qualify as employees under existing labor relations law, given the wide variety of their employment arrangements and contractual relationships. How to design an institutional framework that both broadens the scope of existing labor law and guarantees minimum rights independent of employee status is expected to be the central question going forward.

Participants at the forum broadly agreed that platform workers remain outside the social safety net. Chaired by Jung Heung-jun, a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, the discussion brought together academics and field experts to examine what legal and institutional reforms would be needed to apply the spirit of the ILO convention under South Korean conditions.

Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon described platform workers as a new class of "atypical workers" who have emerged amid structural shifts in the economy, and said they need protection. "From the young factory boys and girls of the industrialization era to the atypical workers of the age of great transformation, every era has had those left outside the boundaries of labor rights," Kim said. "In this age of great transformation, the first thing we must look to is, ultimately, people."

Kim said the government would faithfully incorporate the range of views discussed Tuesday into policy, and pledged to "build a society where all working people are respected, so that no one is excluded from basic rights simply because their form of work is different."