The government is moving to build a dedicated public safety net for atypical workers — including platform workers and freelancers — who struggle to form unions and receive inadequate protection under existing social insurance systems.
The initiative centers on a proposed institution tentatively called the "K-Labor Welfare Chamber," which would bundle retirement savings, rights protection and welfare support under one roof. President Lee Jae Myung first proposed the concept during his tenure as Gyeonggi Province governor and again when he ran for president in 2022.
The Ministry of Employment and Labor held the inaugural meeting of the "K-Labor Welfare Chamber Preparatory Working Group" on Friday at the BizHub Seoul Center in Jung-gu, Seoul, formally launching the system design process.
The K-Labor Welfare Chamber is envisioned as a new public delivery mechanism providing retirement savings, rights protection and welfare benefits to atypical workers — including those in special-type employment, platform workers and freelancers — as the spread of the platform economy and AI pushes more people to work outside traditional employment relationships.
Existing social safety nets were designed around workers bound to a specific employer by a labor contract. As a result, those who move between multiple workplaces or platforms find it comparatively difficult to access social insurance, severance pay and other employment welfare benefits.
Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon said Friday that "traditional employment relationships are dissolving, and a new paradigm defined by algorithms and atypical labor is taking hold," adding that many working people are excluded from public safety nets — including social insurance, severance pay and employment welfare — simply because they are not classified as employees.
The chamber's flagship program under consideration is a "retirement savings fund." The model would allow platform workers and freelancers not employed long-term at any single workplace to accumulate career records and income on an individual basis, linking those records to retirement savings and various welfare benefits.
Park Su-min, an associate research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute who delivered the keynote presentation Friday, analyzed the labor and welfare conditions of workers in special-type employment, platform work and freelancing. She identified the "income gap during periods of inability to work" — due to illness, vacation or unemployment — as the central vulnerability, one that individuals currently bear on their own.
Park recommended that, given the nature of workers who move across multiple jobs and platforms, career records, income and welfare benefits should accumulate and connect around the individual rather than the workplace.
Alongside the chamber, the government is also pursuing legislation called the "Basic Act for Working People," aimed at extending protections to all workers. Kim framed the chamber as a national project at the level of social safety net reform and the legislation as a parallel project at the legal level.
The working group will focus its discussions on the chamber's functions and organizational structure, decision-making governance, the design of the retirement savings program and funding arrangements.
The group plans to finalize the core details by September, then reconstitute itself as a broader forum involving stakeholders from labor and business circles, continuing deliberations through year-end.
"In this era of great transformation defined by AI and the platform economy, the spread of atypical labor means we can no longer close the gaps simply by expanding the framework of existing systems," Kim said. "We are pursuing the Labor Welfare Chamber as a new public safety net delivery mechanism — one that centers on retirement savings while encompassing welfare support and rights protection."
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