“Start Without Pressure!”: (In)visibilisation of Gig Work through Worker Heterogeneity in Seoul

Research on gig work has often treated workers’ experiences and platform control as
analytically distinct and largely one-directional processes. Lee’s study shifts the
analytical lens to the reciprocal interplay between heterogeneous workers and platforms
in shaping how work is organised and governed.

Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, South Korea, it examines
how Baemin-the country’s largest food-delivery platform-mobilises worker
heterogeneity as a mechanism of control. Extending feminist insights on invisible
labour, the article analyses three interrelated dimensions-recognition, skills, and spacetime
dynamics-to demonstrate how the platform renders some workers legible while
obscuring others, reinforcing representations of gig labour as light, flexible, and
detached from livelihood.

By comparing economically dependent, full-time couriers with occasional workers
who participate primarily for leisure or supplementary income, Lee shows that control in
the platform economy emerges through dynamic, relational interactions among workers,
platform practices, and local social conditions.

Youngrong Lee (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the DeGroote School of
Business at McMaster University, and will be presenting her research. She received her PhD in Sociology from the
University of Toronto. Her research focuses on work, gender, social
inequalities, and labour movements. She examines how workers understand,
negotiate, and resist the shifting conditions of contemporary labour markets.
Trained as a global ethnographer and comparative sociologist, she analyses
how global economic forces intersect with local organisational practices,
workers’ intersectional identities, and forms of collective action.