Melting Labour, Welfare State Drift, and the Rise of Youth Precariat in South Korea
Tuesday, 03 March 2026 | 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. | Virtually via Zoom
With Sophia Seung-yoo Lee (School of Social Welfare, Chung-Ang University)
Moderator: Thomas Klassen (York University)
This talk examines how South Korea's compressed welfare state development, designed around standard employment relationships, has failed to adapt to today's "melting labour"—work characterized by blurred boundaries of traditional employment. Despite rapid welfare expansion, over one-third of young workers in Korea experience persistent precarity, creating severe polarization within the younger generation. Welfare state "drift" excludes precarious workers from social protection, disproportionately affecting young men who exhibit declining expectations for upward mobility and deepening distrust of institutions, ultimately undermining intergenerational solidarity in Korea.
Professor Sophia Seung-yoon Lee earned her PhD in social policy from the University of Oxford with a comparative study on East Asian welfare production regimes and non-regular workers. Her primary research areas include welfare states and labour markets, precarious employment, labour market policies and institutionalism. She has published over 80 academic peer reviewed papers and books. She is the author of Varieties of Precarity: Melting Labour and the Failure to Protect Workers in the Korean Welfare State.
Prior to joining Chung-Ang University as a Full Professor she was an Associate Professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. From 2020 to 2022, Professor Lee served as the inaugural civilian vice-chair of the Youth Policy Coordination Committee which reported to the office of the South Korean Prime Minister.
In the summer of 2025 she was held a Research Collaboration Fellowship at the York Centre for Asian Research. She is an external associate of the Global Labour Research Centre at York University. During 2026 she is a Visiting Professor at the Freie University in Berlin, Germany.
Co-presented by the York Centre for Asian Research, Korean Office for Research and Education and the Global Labour Research Centre.
For more information: kore[at]yorku.ca
