Redrawing the Boundaries of Secure Work

Across East Asia, the link between work and a secure life is being unsettled by demographic aging, technological change, migration, expanding care needs, and longer working lives. Yet these pressures do not simply replace existing labor-market divisions. Long-standing boundaries—between large and small firms, prime contractors and subcontractors, regular and non-regular employment, and gendered divisions of labor—interact with newer forms of dependent contracting, platform work, and algorithmic management, redistributing security and risk.

This session asks how the boundaries of secure work are being redrawn, who gains access to stable income, social protection, sustainable careers, and viable life prospects, and who remains outside them. Japan and Korea offer a revealing comparison. Both share segmented employment systems and rapid demographic change. One working hypothesis is that turbulence unfolds through different pathways: in Korea, through widening inequalities in employment, housing, and assets—including divisions within younger generations—and in Japan, through prolonged wage stagnation, differentiated employment trajectories, and unequal access to family resources and intergenerational transfers. Rather than treating this contrast as settled, the session invites empirical work that tests, refines, or challenges it.

We welcome papers on Japan, Korea, and other East Asian societies that examine institutions and labor-market structures, workers’ strategies and experiences, or their interaction. The session treats turbulence as both structural change and a condition navigated with unequally distributed resources. By connecting older and emerging boundaries, it seeks to explain how labor-market turbulence reshapes protection, inequality, and life chances across the region.