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Abstract: 

This talk examines how platform capitalism is reshaping work in South Korea, focusing on the everyday struggles of meal delivery riders. It explores how algorithmic management, self-employment classifications, and legal ambiguity create highly precarious and often invisible forms of labor. The lecture highlights how delivery workers are organizing and resisting these conditions through both traditional union strategies and digital forms of mobilization. It also situates their struggles within South Korea’s broader neoliberal economy, where precarious labor plays a central role. Importantly, not only workers but also small business owners, such as cafés and restaurants are increasingly subject to the exploitative practices of major platforms like Baemin (Delivery Hero) and Coupang Eats. Together, these actors are challenging dominant narratives that frame platform companies as neutral intermediaries.

Bio:

Dr. Lee Seonok is a lecturer of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. She was born and raised in South Korea. She earned my PhD at UBC, Vancouver, Canada. Her earlier work in South Korea examined social and labour movements among undocumented migrant workers through long-term participant observation. For her doctoral project on the racialisation of migrants in South Korea, she extended this approach by working as a factory worker in several Korean factories and spending time with immigrant mothers. More recently, she worked as a food delivery rider in the Netherlands while also conducting digital ethnography in online worker communities in both the Netherlands and South Korea.

The lecture will be simultaneously available on ZOOM 

Meeting ID: 659 4197 0661