The government plans to fully overhaul the "survey method" flagged by the National Data Office in connection with its fact-finding survey of platform workers, including delivery riders. The goal is to obtain approval as national statistics and, based on that, to push in earnest policies such as the "labor respect legislative package," which have struggled amid a statistics gap.
According to the government on the 14th, the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MOEL) is said to have submitted in Oct. a proposal to the National Data Office to relaunch the platform worker fact-finding survey as national statistics. The aim is to restore the foundational data for policy implementation at a time when related statistics have been halted.
Platform workers receive tasks and earn pay through online platforms and work across various fields such as delivery, substitute driving, and content creation. However, because they are not classified as workers under the Labor Standards Act, they do not receive institutional protection for wages, welfare, and industrial safety and are left in a blind spot for industrial accidents.
The labor ministry and the Korea Employment Information Service released an annual platform worker fact-finding survey from 2021 through last year, but publication was halted after their application for approval as national statistics to regularize release was denied. The National Data Office determined that the existing survey method did not sufficiently secure the representativeness of the population.
The previous survey randomly selected 50,000 people nationwide ages 15 to 69, identified platform workers, and then applied post-stratification weights. The National Data Office noted that the population size was small and that random sampling alone made it difficult to meet national statistics standards.
The labor ministry estimates that, as of last year, there were about 883,000 platform workers, and about 1.44 million when including dependent contractors. As calls grow to include them within the scope of legal protection even if their status as wage workers is ambiguous, the ministry says policy design based on statistics is necessary.
The labor ministry and the National Data Office have reached a consensus on the need to publish the statistics. The National Data Office recommended research teams and proposed commissioning a study, and the labor ministry accepted, deciding to conduct a research project in the first half of next year to improve population construction and survey methodology. Based on this, if approval as national statistics is granted, the platform worker fact-finding survey could be released again as early as 2026.