If People Are to Live with Dignity, Two Paths Aren't Enough

In Korea, there are thought to be two main ways to earn a living.

One is employment. The other is entrepreneurship.

Take a job and you become a worker. Start a business and you become a business owner.

Institutions, social attitudes, finance, insurance, taxes — almost everything sorts people around these two words.

But the way people actually live isn't that simple.

Some people hold a job while running a side project. Some take on contract work while building their own product. Some scrape by as freelancers and then incorporate. Some try to get hired again after a failed startup. Some work on a platform while growing their own service at the same time.

These people are workers, and business owners, and sometimes neither.

The problem isn't that these people are strange — it's that the system hasn't kept up with reality.

For people to live with dignity, there can't be only two paths.

Both employment and entrepreneurship have to be open. And more importantly, the road between them has to be open. If you slip on one side, you have to be able to cross to the other. Only then does a single failure stop deciding an entire life.

But Korea's current system makes that transition far too expensive.

Leave a company and your safety net weakens; register a business and the risks you automatically take on grow. Fail at a startup and it's hard to get hired again; get hired and you lack the time, credit, and freedom to start a business again.

In the end, the question isn't "employment or entrepreneurship."

The problem is that the person has disappeared between the two paths.

Korea's System Looks at Status Before It Looks at the Person

Korea's labor, welfare, tax, and credit systems have long been designed around the standard worker. The Labor Standards Act defines a worker as "a person who, regardless of the type of occupation, provides labor to a business or workplace for the purpose of wages." This definition is an important starting point for protecting people inside a traditional employment relationship, but the problem is that much of today's work happens outside those boundaries.

Employment insurance, too, is basically described as a social insurance system funded by "a fund jointly contributed by workers and employers," supporting unemployment prevention, employment promotion, vocational skills development, and the livelihood stability and re-employment of laid-off workers. The starting point of this system is still the employment relationship and insured-person status.

Of course, it's not that Korea has no system at all. The self-employed can also enroll in employment insurance, and Employment24 describes self-employed employment insurance as "employment insurance for the boss themselves." A self-employed person running a business alone with no employees, or employing fewer than 50 workers, can enroll under certain conditions. If they close the business, they can also receive unemployment benefit support.

But the key point here is that "it exists" and "it's enough" are two different things.

Self-employed employment insurance is not protection that follows you automatically. You have to enroll, you have to pay premiums, and you have to meet certain requirements. According to Employment24, the self-employed job-seeking benefit is paid when you've been enrolled for at least a year and close the business for reasons such as declining revenue, and it's structured to pay 60% of your standard wage for somewhere between 120 and 210 days, depending on how long you were enrolled. There's also an explicit caveat that you may not receive payment if you've fallen behind on premiums or don't meet the eligibility requirements.

So the more accurate way to put it is this.

In Korea, the moment you register a business, not all protection instantly vanishes.

But a great deal of protection shifts from an automatic right to a matter of separate enrollment, separate proof, and separately meeting requirements.

That difference is huge.

A worker is, in principle, inside the system from the start, and only exceptionally falls out of it.

Business owners, freelancers, and platform workers are, in principle, outside it, and have to prove their eligibility themselves to get in.

This structure makes people weak.

Right now, Korean society has a growing number of people who are hard to explain with the existing categories.

The solo founder.

The freelance developer.

The person building their own product while taking on contract work.

The multi-jobber.

The platform worker.

The sole proprietor who, in practice, works in dependence on one particular company.

The person with no employment contract whose working hours and income depend on a platform's algorithm.

The person with no company on paper who still builds products and deals with customers.

The person who has registered a business but whose revenue hasn't stabilized yet.

None of them are "abnormal."

If anything, they're proof that the labor market has already changed.

In a policy brief on the case of Korea's platform workers, the International Labour Organization (ILO) explains that platform workers grew rapidly after COVID-19, and that they had been excluded from social insurance coverage because of their employment status and administrative complexity. In response, Korea extended employment insurance and industrial accident insurance to platform workers, and expanded the system by using the concept of the "labor provider" and digital administrative systems, under which platform operators report and remit records of labor provided and income data.

According to the ILO's data, Korea's platform workers in the narrow sense were estimated at 795,000 in 2022, while platform workers in the broad sense were put at 2.9 million in 2022. It also notes that only about 6% of platform workers have signed an employment contract.

What these numbers say is simple.

This problem is not a small handful of exceptions.

Vast numbers of people are already working between employment and entrepreneurship, between worker and business owner, between independence and dependence.

And yet the system still asks.

"Are you a worker, or a business owner?"

"Pick one of the two."

But people's lives don't work that way.

The reason people need to be able to move between employment and entrepreneurship isn't simply "freedom."

It's a matter of survival.

In a society where getting a job is treated as almost the only right answer, it's not easy for someone who has once left that track to return to it. Gaps in a résumé draw suspicion, and a startup background often gets reduced to the question, "Why didn't you stay at a company longer?" Companies frequently see someone with startup experience not as a proactive person but as "someone who'll leave again eventually."

The reverse is just as true.

When someone who started a business fails, they lose credit, cash flow, relationships, and psychological stability all at once. What remains is personal guarantees, unpaid receivables, taxes, leases, debts to partners, a lowered credit rating, and the label of "someone who used to be a boss." Even when they try to get hired again in that state, society doesn't see them as a stable candidate.

The problem isn't failure itself.

The real problem is that the road to recovery after failure is far too narrow.

In a good society, a person should be able to leave a job and start a business.

If they start a business and fail, they should be able to get hired again.

They should be able to get by on contract work while building a product again.

They should be able to found a company while working part-time.

They should be able to work as a freelancer and then move back into an organization.

That flow should feel natural.

But in Korea, the cost is too high at every moment of transition.

Every time your form of employment changes, your insurance wobbles.

Every time the form of your income changes, your taxes and credit wobble.

Simply because you've registered a business, loan reviews, leases, and proof of income all become more complicated.

A startup background gets read not as evidence of ambition but as a trace of having dropped out.

When this is how it works, people can't take the risk.

To put it precisely, only those who can afford to take the risk take it.

Only those who already have assets, or family support, or enough cushion to survive a failure take it.

In that kind of society, entrepreneurship becomes not a freedom but a privilege.

The first thing that has to change is the basis of protection.

Many current systems look at your form of employment first.

Are you a worker?

A business owner?

A regional (self-paying) insurance subscriber?

A workplace-based insurance subscriber?

A self-employed person?

A labor provider?

An artist?

A worker in special-type employment?

Of course, administration needs categories. A system can't function with no criteria at all. But the problem is when a category becomes not a tool for protecting people but a threshold that excludes them.

National Health Insurance, too, has an eligibility structure of workplace subscribers, regional subscribers, and dependents, and there's a system under which a person who depends mainly on a workplace subscriber for their livelihood can register as a dependent. Health insurance is relatively universal, but its premium calculation and eligibility structure are still affected by changes in income and employment status.

Employment insurance and industrial accident insurance are affected by your form of employment even more directly. Korea has been widening its scope of coverage toward artists, labor providers, and platform workers. The Ministry of Employment and Labor issued an explanatory document stating that, as of July 2021, employment insurance applies to labor providers — that is, workers in special-type employment.

This change matters. But a question still remains.

Why does a person have to fit into a particular category first in order to be protected?

Why must the safety net wobble every time the way someone works changes?

Why does the system ask "what status is this person?" before it asks "is this person in danger?"

What's really needed is not to create one more, third status.

What's needed is a safety net that follows the person, not their status.

Today you have a job, tomorrow you register as a sole proprietor, next month you take on contract work, and the month after that you might get hired again. Through all of it, healthcare, unemployment coverage, accident insurance, pensions, vocational training, and re-start support must not be cut off or weakened each time.

A person's life is continuous, but the system keeps reading it in broken pieces.

People get hurt in those gaps.

This doesn't mean other countries are perfect.

But at least a number of countries have been trying not to view this problem solely through the simple binary of "worker or business owner."

The UK distinguishes employment status as employee, worker, and self-employed. GOV.UK explains that employment status affects one's rights at work and an employer's responsibilities. A "worker" doesn't have all the rights an employee does, but is also different from someone who is fully self-employed. It's an intermediate category that grants some labor rights to people who are subject to a degree of control and dependence.

California's AB5 is another approach. The California Franchise Tax Board explains that AB5 requires applying the ABC test to determine, for the purposes of labor law, unemployment insurance law, and the Industrial Welfare Commission's wage orders, whether someone is a worker or an independent contractor. California's Department of Industrial Relations likewise points to the ABC test for distinguishing independent contractors from workers.

France's micro-entrepreneur scheme is structured so that a one-person business can start up in a relatively simple way and, once it exceeds a certain revenue threshold, moves over to a different tax regime. France's official administrative portal Service-Public explains that the micro-entreprise scheme applies according to an annual revenue threshold, and that exceeding the threshold for a certain period shifts the business into the standard tax system.

The European Union also addresses platform work as its own issue. EU Directive 2024/2831, a directive for improving platform working conditions, holds that algorithm-based technology has driven the growth of digital labor platforms and created new risks, and that, left unregulated, it can lead to surveillance, power imbalances, opacity in decision-making, and risks to working conditions and to health and safety.

These examples all point in one direction.

Modern work can no longer be explained solely by "the worker inside a company" and "the fully independent business owner."

People work in between.

And the law has to look at that in-between.

This problem is not a complaint peculiar to Korea. International organizations have long treated non-standard work and the blind spots in social security as important policy issues.

In a report on the future of social protection, the OECD points out that most social protection systems were designed with the typical full-time dependent worker in mind, and that non-standard work such as self-employment or online gig work can create gaps in coverage. It also notes that, on average across the OECD, about 16% of all workers are self-employed and about 13% of wage workers are on temporary contracts.

More important is the OECD's policy conclusion. The OECD holds that, to reduce gaps in protection, it's necessary to harmonize social security contributions and protections across forms of employment as much as possible, and to bring workers on the boundary between dependence and independence into the standard social protection system. It also points out that voluntary-enrollment approaches may not work well for non-standard workers — because of adverse selection, where only high-risk people enroll, it's hard to achieve a sufficiently high enrollment rate.

The ILO, too, sees the classification of employment status as central to the social protection of platform and gig workers. The ILO explains that, because in many legal systems labor and social protections are tightly linked to whether work is dependent employment or independent labor, accurately determining a platform worker's status affects not only social protection but also labor protections such as the minimum wage, occupational safety and health, and the right to collective bargaining.

This applies to Korea exactly as well.

Korea's problem is not that people are lazy, or lack a spirit of enterprise, or don't understand entrepreneurship.

The problem is that the way people work has already changed, while the principle of protection is still tied to the standard employment of the past.

Korea's Task Is Not "Adding Exceptions" but "Redesigning the Principle"

It's not that Korea has seen no change.

There's self-employed employment insurance, there's labor-provider employment insurance, and there's been an expansion of accident and employment insurance for platform workers. The ILO, too, credits Korea with using legal amendments and digital administrative methods to expand social insurance for platform workers.

But the approach so far has mostly been one of patching exceptions onto the existing structure.

There's a worker-centered system.

Outside it, you create an exception for the self-employed.

Outside that, you create an exception for artists.

Outside that, you create an exception for labor providers.

Outside that, you create an exception for platform workers.

This approach is necessary to a degree.

But it's not a fundamental solution.

Because real people keep working in new forms.

It's not just today's platform workers. Tomorrow there may be more AI freelancers, remote microservice workers, solo SaaS operators, creator-developers, contract researchers, globally-outsourced founders, and one-person company heads running automation tools.

You can't keep up with reality by tacking on one more exception clause every time a new job category appears.

So the law has to change its question.

"Is this person a worker or a business owner?"

This question alone isn't enough.

Does this person make a living through their labor?

Is their income unstable?

Are they exposed to occupational risk?

Are they economically dependent on a particular client or platform?

Can they recover if they lose their job or close their business?

Do they have the minimum time and cash flow to make a comeback?

Protection has to follow risk, not status.

The system has to look at substance, not labels.

It's not only labor law that blocks movement between employment and entrepreneurship.

Finance and credit scoring are big barriers too.

A founder's income is irregular.

There may be revenue but low net profit, and there may be net profit but complicated documentation. When the money flows of the company and the individual are kept separate, it can actually look unfavorable for personal credit. In the early days of a business, credit cards, loans, leases, guarantees, taxes, and insurance premiums all act as pressure.

A worker, by contrast, has the simple proof of a monthly salary.

Financial institutions read a salary as stability.

But future productivity, the ability to develop products, the ability to win customers, technical skill, and the potential for recurring revenue aren't sufficiently reflected in existing credit scoring.

As a result, something strange happens.

Even someone capable of creating greater value in the future is rated low simply because they have no salary right now.

Even someone trying to build a business that creates jobs and added value gets lumped into a higher-risk group simply because they're a business owner.

Someone who has failed once is punished longer by the financial market, regardless of their actual ability.

In this structure, entrepreneurship becomes not a path to innovation for society as a whole but a high-risk gamble an individual has to bear.

Of course, financial institutions can't ignore risk.

Loans and guarantees have to account for the real possibility of loss.

But when credit scoring leans too heavily on "have you ever been a business owner?" or "is your income in the form of a salary?", society fails to properly evaluate new ways of working.

Future credit scoring has to become more sophisticated.

It has to reflect factors like the recurrence of revenue, customer retention rates, the quality of contracts, tax payment history, digital sales data, product assets, intellectual property, small recurring income, global payment records, and the stability of platform earnings.

The point isn't that a person becomes risky the instant they leave a company; what matters is looking at the way they're creating value.

Comeback Support Is Not Welfare but Productivity Policy

Saying we should help failed founders is not a sentimental statement.

It's productivity policy.

A failed founder is not someone who knows nothing.

On the contrary, they're someone who has learned markets, customers, products, taxes, contracts, hiring, cash flow, and legal risk firsthand. When society lets that person fall away entirely, that experience is thrown away with them.

The point isn't that we should just hand money to people who've failed.

What's really needed is a structure that makes recovery possible.

People have to be able to survive a certain period of income gap after closing a business.

Debt restructuring has to be connected to support for restarting a business and getting re-employed.

A startup background must not be read only as a disadvantage in the job market.

Personal guarantees and business failure must not be allowed to wreck a person's credit for life to an excessive degree.

The minimum legal, accounting, and financial counseling needed to start a business again after failure has to be provided.

Employment24 describes self-employed employment insurance, too, as a system that supports livelihood stability and re-employment or re-starting a business. This direction is right. The point is only that it must be expanded from a matter of some subscribers and some requirements into a transition safety net for everyone who works.

Only when people can rise again after failing does society itself learn.

A society that uses people once and discards them can't accumulate experience.

Many people propose, as a solution to this problem, "a third category between worker and business owner."

That direction is needed. An intermediate category like the UK's "worker" is worth looking to as well.

But simply creating a single third status isn't enough.

Because that, too, can become just one more category.

Worker.

Business owner.

Third worker.

Even if you make three boxes like this, reality slips through the gaps between them again.

The problem isn't the number of boxes; it's that protection is trapped inside the boxes.

So the key isn't a "third status" but "portable rights."

A history of employment-insurance enrollment should accumulate even when your form of employment changes.

The right to vocational training should work even when you don't belong to a company.

Accident protection has to look at actual risk rather than the name on a contract.

Unemployment benefits have to reflect, more finely, not just job changes between full-time positions but the realities of business failure and sharp drops in income.

Health insurance and pensions have to be predictable even when the form of your work changes.

Credit scoring must not view startup experience as nothing but risk.

Not a society where rights are cut off every time a person changes paths,

but a society where a minimum set of rights follows the person wherever they work.

Korea's reality has already changed.

The problem is not that people are working strangely outside the system.

It's that the system is standing outside reality.

The solo founder is not an exception.

The freelancer is not a stopgap.

The multi-jobber is not some strange choice made by precarious young people.

The platform worker is not merely a side effect of a transitional era.

The person building their own product while taking on contract work is not a person in a gray zone.

They are real members of the new economy.

The law must not see them as abnormal.

The law must not treat them as merely temporary exceptions.

The law has to start from the fact that they already exist.

Of course, not every business owner can be treated as a worker.

Reclassifying every freelancer as a company employee isn't the solution either.

Some people have chosen autonomy and independence, and some really do grow by taking on business risk.

But conversely, treating everyone with a business registration as an independent operator and leaving them outside protection also distorts reality.

Just because a contract says "freelancer" doesn't mean someone is actually free.

Having a business registration certificate doesn't give someone bargaining power.

Being able to switch a platform app on and off doesn't make someone's livelihood stable.

The law has to look at substance over labels.

And while looking at substance, it must not block people's movement.

For a person to live with dignity doesn't just mean not going hungry.

It means being able to choose again even after failing once.

It means today's choice doesn't become a lifelong stigma.

It means that taking a job doesn't close the road to entrepreneurship, and starting a business doesn't close the road to employment.

I'm working as a solo founder right now.

I build my own product, take on contract work, form partnerships, test the market, and then fix the product again. That's why I feel it all the more acutely: the current system was not designed with people like me at the center.

But this isn't my problem alone.

More and more people will come to work this way.

You can't explain society solely through people who stay at one company for life, and you can't explain entrepreneurship solely through the traditional self-employed.

If Korea truly wants to become a nation of entrepreneurs,

it must not consume entrepreneurship merely as a heroic tale.

"In reality, starting a business is hard, grueling, and often ends in failure."

Which means we have to build a system in which you can recover even after failing.

If Korea truly wants to protect workers, it must not look only at the people inside an employment contract.

It has to look at the risks faced by everyone who makes a living through their labor.

Employment and entrepreneurship are not roads on opposite sides.

They are two routes a single person should be able to move between over the course of a life.

In between lie contract work, learning, failure, recovery, and the time it takes to try again.

The two roads have to be truly open.

And moving between them must not break a person.

Only then does a person live with dignity.

The law has to reach that far.