Occupational safety for female riders amid gendered risks

Minjoo Jeong

Translated by Se-Eun Kim

Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health

This study examines how gender impacts occupational safety for female motorcycle delivery workers in the food delivery industry, including how ‘delivery traffic accidents’ are handled as occupational accidents.

In a road traffic system centered on four-wheeled vehicles, motorcycle delivery work has been regulated through crackdowns by police authorities, which have reinforced and reproduced the sociocultural stigmatization of riders through derogatory terms such as ‘reckless drivers,’ ‘iron bags,’ and ‘ttalbae’ (the word that is the reverse of bae-dal, which means ‘delivery’ in Korean).

However, after the COVID-19 pandemic, the poor working conditions of riders began to be socially highlighted. Delivery traffic accidents were discussed as occupational accidents resulting from an unstable income structure rather than individual deviations, and accordingly, legal and institutional improvements were made, such as mandatory riders’ enrollment in workers’ compensation insurance and employment insurance.

As the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance Act was revised, discrimination based on employment type was alleviated, and as the Act to Develop the Logistics Service Industry for Daily Life was enacted, the food delivery industry began to be systematized. The occupational safety of riders, which had been neglected on the grounds that they received work from multiple platforms that were not considered to be traditional employment relationships, began to be legally specified, and related measures were concretized.

However, as the safety of riders became visible as ‘traffic accidents during delivery,’ a discourse centered on traffic safety began to form. While wearing helmets and having a driver’s license have been emphasized to prevent occupational accidents, measures against verbal abuse and assault that riders may be exposed to when meeting restaurant owners or customers remain absent.

This study examines this gap by raising three research questions based on awareness of the myths about the standard male body that have biased how occupational safety has been organized for female riders. First, how is occupational safety visualized and in what form is it institutionalized? Second, what is the context in which ‘traffic accidents during delivery’ occur? Third, what is the role of the delivery agency office and how does this constitute riders’ occupational safety? Riders’ occupational safety has been distorted within the dichotomy of ‘male-perpetrator’ and ‘female-victim’ based on the fact that the majority of workers are male, and the delivery agency industry has taken the risk of traffic accidents for granted while adopting the strong male body as the norm.

This study analyzed the gap between laws and systems and the workplace by examining the socio-cultural context surrounding traffic accidents, including the delivery service industry blind spots that are part of its organizational culture. In-depth interviews were conducted with female riders as the main research subject. The study participants were recruited from March to October 2024 through snowball sampling,[1] and a total of 12 female riders participated. The average age of the study participants was 31.3 years, and 6 of the 12 had experience working for a delivery agency. Three participants held management positions. In addition to in-depth interviews, the researcher attempted to approach the experiences of female riders in a multi-layered manner through literature review and participant observation.

There are six key findings in this study:

1. The occupational safety of riders was conditionally institutionalized out of the need to foster a new logistics industry. The Act to Develop the Logistics Service Industry for Daily Life recommends that business owners create a standard contract specifying working hours and transportation costs and provide rest areas, but this is limited to cases where workers use motorcycles for delivery. This is because motorcycles were highlighted as the cause of maximizing the damage from ‘traffic accidents during delivery,’ and other means of transportation were considered relatively safe.

2. The risk of traffic accidents to which riders are exposed is gendered. The male-centered driving culture includes direct threats, retaliation, and aggressive driving against female riders, and the road traffic system centered on four-wheeled vehicles approves of this.

3. As their delivery experience increased, riders became accustomed to being ‘trapped’ and ‘crushed.’ In situations where they were routinely exposed to physical danger, riders prioritized the distinction between ‘contact accidents’ and ‘non-contact accidents’ over the health impacts they suffered. Depending on the nature of the traffic accident, riders were moving between the status of workers who could receive compensation for occupational injuries and perpetrators who should be punished under criminal law. This situation led research participants to prefer negotiating with the other party to receiving a settlement amount rather than reporting occupational injuries.

4. Female riders were looking for delivery agencies to secure stable work. Riders are subordinated to the delivery agency office through motorcycle lease rather than employment contract, and low entry barriers, unclear working conditions, and high daily insurance premiums threaten riders’ labor rights. In addition to the economic structure, female riders were also under pressure to prove their competence and endure high work intensity.

5. The delivery agency office helped alleviate the legal, economic, and physical burdens that individual riders face in the process of handling traffic accidents. Riders belonging to a delivery agency office were able to intervene in various ways, such as witnessing each other’s traffic accidents, calling insurance companies to handle claims, and making deliveries on their behalf. This became the starting point for forming a sense of solidarity.

6. The organizational culture within the delivery agency office gendered the risk of traffic accidents based on the idea that ‘women are physically weaker than men.’ This led to unreasonable practices such as excluding female riders from work. The culture within the delivery agency office, which focused on post-accident handling rather than preventing traffic accidents, created a gendered hierarchy by attributing traffic accidents to an individual’s lack of motorcycle driving skills.

Finally, while ‘delivery traffic accidents’ were perceived as the biggest risk, female riders were disproportionately assigned to sales positions that provided relatively stable incomes. Female riders contributed to the total income of delivery agency offices through gendered practices while being removed from the immediate risk of traffic accidents. However, they were exposed to other risks through tasks such as mediating conflicts between restaurant owners and riders.

[1] Snowball sampling is technique in which existing subjects in a study recruit future subjects, thereby increasing the sample size like a rolling snowball. The technique is also known as chain sampling, chain-referral sampling, or referral sampling.