Late at night, you come home from work and your child suddenly says there is an item that must be taken to school tomorrow. With neighborhood commercial districts having collapsed and small self-employed shops having disappeared, it has long been difficult to find a local stationery store. The large supermarket that operates late requires driving. The easiest solution is to pay for Coupang Rocket Wow membership and receive dawn delivery. In this way, Coupang has drastically reduced the large amount of time that housework, caregiving, and reproductive labor occupy in everyday life. If the item can be handled, does that mean there is no problem?

Feminist researcher Yun Bo-Ra, a lecturer in sociology at Chonnam National University, says, “Platforms such as Coupang are turning care gaps and the reproduction crisis into profit.” Long working hours and time poverty, the reproductive groundwork that has reached its limits as a result, and the responsibility for reproduction concentrated on women together with gaps in care have created a ‘new market’. A social crisis, in effect, has produced the profits of capital.

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At the ‘Gender Politics of the Platform Economy as Seen Through the Coupang Affair’ forum held on the 28th at the education center of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in Jung-gu, Seoul, Lecturer Yun said, “The reproduction crisis is being converted, piece by piece, into the data of capital, and what has grown by feeding on that reproduction crisis is Coupang.” It operates in ways such as showing a homemaker who regularly buys daily necessities for elderly parents living in the provinces and school supplies for an elementary school student discount coupons for regular bottled-water deliveries, holiday gift sets for parents, and advertisements for mutual-aid funeral services.

Lecturer Yun said, “Care gaps and desperate hours are being offered as free data that accelerate and heighten the predictive algorithms of capital,” and, “The process of sucking up the micro-level data of individuals and converting it into a means of profit-making shows that ‘the reproduction crisis of our society’ is the basic engine of Coupang.”

Lecturer Yun also analyzed that, in this process, the path to resolving public demands for care and reproductive rights through democratic means is being encroached upon. Instead of demanding civic rights such as strengthening state responsibility for care, the notion that it is enough simply to ‘consume’ is spreading.

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She said, “The spread of the idea that ‘If there is no money, you should not have children’ is also the result of care and everything else having come to be naturally entrusted to consumption and the market,” adding, “Voices raising ‘public demands’ for raising children and caring for older people are also being erased by the growth of platforms that have captured the reproduction crisis.” Lecturer Yun said, “What we have lost is not only the common-entrance passcode and personal information, but also the imagination that we must overcome social crises for ‘communal solutions’.”

Lee So-Jin, a lecturer in sociology at Yonsei University who is conducting participant-observation research while working directly at a Coupang Fresh Center, analyzed how Coupang utilizes the labor of women in low-wage, high-intensity jobs. He said the Coupang logistics centers are structurally bound to prefer compliant workers. This is because, at relatively low wage levels, they must endure repetitive work over long hours, changes in days off, and irregular overtime. He said, “Because the wages are not at a level that can support a household, these conditions ultimately operate to reinforce a staffing composition centered on women workers.”

He said, “Even while paying an hourly wage similar to the minimum wage, the practice of flexibly deploying labor by forcing frequent overtime is observed in production jobs where middle-aged women account for the majority,” adding, “Long hours of high-intensity labor based on the minimum wage are being structured as a way of mobilizing women workers who are thought to be free from breadwinner responsibility or otherwise see no alternatives.”

Jeong Da-Ul, who drew attention at last year’s impeachment square by coming out carrying a banner reading ‘Consumers Group That Does Not Need Seven-Day Delivery’, said, “Under the gendered division of labor and labor discrimination restructured by platforms, housework has been made more efficient but has not disappeared, logistics labor has been fragmented, and the burden and aversion have been shifted onto the workers in the most vulnerable positions,” and, “If we do not ask what the convenience of platforms is based on, platforms will continue to make gender discrimination ‘invisible’ and intensify it.”