Work in the post-COVID-19 pandemic: the case of South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the transformation of work and employment in the period of post-COVID-19 in South Korea. The COVD-19 pandemic displays the failure of the market in managing the public health crisis and the crisis of neoliberal globalization, demanding massive state intervention to reproduce the stability of the social system. COVID-19 disrupted global production networks and global supply chains, generating economic disorder and mass unemployment. It also revealed the segmented labour market based on firm size, gender, employment status, and inadequate social protection. The COVID-19 pandemic, therefore, reveals problems that are embedded in the Korean economy, though at the same time provides an opportunity to discuss alternatives to the neoliberal economy. In particular, discourses on universal basic income and universal unemployment insurance have gained popularity as COVID-19 has disrupted mass’ livelihood through promoting precarious work and expanding the population unprotected by labour laws and the social security system.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• precarious work
• labour market segmentation
• global supply chain
• universal basic income
• Korea

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier version of the paper. Especially, I want to express gratitude for Kevin Gray’s editorial comments that were very helpful in the revision of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lee proposed the UBI with the new tax such as carbon tax and basic income tax (Yonhap, 2021).

2 For the last year, 109 academic papers were published in journals in social sciences and humanities in South Korea. Daily newspapers report scholarly debates on basic income and Governor Lee’s comments on related issues.

3 Mayor Oh promised to carry out a pilot experiment with 200 households in 2021. The main idea of the assured income is that the state transfer half the gap between the median income and the household income to the low-income households. Therefore, the amount of transferred income differs according to the level of income among the low-income households.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kwang-Yeong Shin

Kwang-Yeong Shin is CAU-Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Chung-Ang University. He has been doing research on the work, inequality, and welfare in East Asia. His most recent book is Precarious Asia: Global capitalism and work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia (co-authored by Arne L. Kalleberg and Kevin Hewison, Stanford University Press, forthcoming).