The Scene of East Asian Platform Labor Movements — From Isolation to Solidarity, Testimony from the Rider Union
Source
Platform Labor Movement, From Isolation to Solidarity | East Asian Labor Movement Exchange Session ②
Why this was selected
This is a rare piece that meets all three criteria of theoretical sophistication, alignment with reality, and field specificity. It is a compilation of what an activist from the Public Transport Workers' Union Rider Union personally saw and heard while attending the October 2025 Tokyo East Asian Labor Fest, and contains primary field testimony on the organizing strategies, achievements, and limitations of platform labor movements in South Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Specific achievements—such as the Rider Union's tactics to counter algorithmic control like 'call dropping' and 'delivery app OFF actions', the life-based organizing model centered on B-mart logistics hubs, and the abolition of the exclusive injury insurance requirement—are analyzed alongside comparative country cases (Japan's UberEats Union failure in social media organizing, China's repressive structure, and Taiwan's 'social union' experiment). It is difficult to find this level of comparative, field-integrated analysis through ordinary searches.
Context
While this site's series 'Political Economy of Class in AI·Platform Capitalism' (platform-capitalism-01~05.md) covered theoretical and structural analysis of platform labor, this article shows the subject of that analysis—the actual organizing field—from an East Asian comparative perspective. In particular, the practical experience of the Rider Union concretely verifies the discussion on demands for algorithmic democracy and the limitations of platform cooperatives covered in Part 5. Platformssi (플랫폼씨) is an independent media specializing in East Asian labor movements, filling the field and comparative perspectives that mainstream progressive media often miss.