For an industry that has spent years talking about exploitative contracts, brutal schedules, trainee debt, mental health, lack of sleep and companies controlling nearly every aspect of an idol’s career, you would think forming an idol union would be an easy sell.
Apparently not.
The attempt to establish South Korea’s first idol labor union has effectively collapsed. The organizing committee, led by former TEEN TOP member Bang Min-soo, better known as C.A.P, submitted its application in September 2025. On May 13, according to JoongAng Ilbo, Bang informed the Ministry of Employment and Labor’s Seongnam branch that he was withdrawing it, citing differences in values among the people involved in establishing the union. But there was a bigger problem underneath that explanation.
When the union was first announced, Bang told reporters that around 10 idols had expressed interest in joining. The actual application listed two — two people, out of an entire industry that spends its own downtime online complaining about exactly the conditions this union was supposed to fix. That’s remarkable considering how much attention the proposed union initially received, particularly as conversations about idol working conditions exploded during the NewJeans-ADOR dispute. It’s also remarkable that the labor office reportedly had to send the committee back four separate times over those nine months asking for missing documentation, which isn’t exactly the sign of an operation with its legal and administrative footing under it. Asked directly about what happened, Bang told JoongAng Ilbo, “I have nothing to say.”
So what happened? I don’t think the lesson is that K-pop doesn’t need organized labor. I think they may have tried to build it backwards.
The Hanni Effect Gave Idol Labor Rights a Very Public Face
It is difficult to separate the timing of this union effort from what was happening with NewJeans.
In October 2024, Hanni appeared before South Korea’s National Assembly and spoke about alleged workplace mistreatment, including the now-famous incident in which she said a manager instructed members of another group to “ignore her.” The appearance became international news and turned Hanni into one of the most visible faces of the conversation around idol workplace protections.
There was also a legitimate legal question underneath all of this: are idols actually workers? That question mattered in a very specific way for Hanni. She raised allegations of workplace harassment but wasn’t afforded protection under South Korea’s workplace harassment laws, because idols generally aren’t considered employees under the Labor Standards Act. Contractually, they’re framed as something closer to business partners — people who receive a share of earnings rather than a salary, and who aren’t under the kind of direct command-and-supervision that legally defines an employee.
The NewJeans dispute therefore seemed to arrive at exactly the right moment for people arguing that idols needed greater collective protection.
But what happened afterward also complicates that narrative. The courts repeatedly sided with ADOR in its contractual dispute with NewJeans, rejecting the members’ arguments that ADOR had committed breaches serious enough to justify terminating their exclusive contracts. Evidence presented during the litigation also provided considerably more information about NewJeans’ working and financial circumstances — and these were not struggling rookie idols earning minimum wage. The members had become extraordinarily successful very quickly and received substantial individual payouts relatively early in their careers. Their facilities, resources and treatment also appear to have been significantly better than what many struggling idols could ever expect.
It raises a legitimate question about representation: was the inspiration from the supposed courage that one of K-pop’s most rewarded young idols not enough to put an important organization into action?
We Don’t Know Whether That Hurt the Union — and We Shouldn’t Pretend We Do
There is no evidence that idols looked at what happened with NewJeans and collectively said, “Never mind. We don’t need a union.” However, the timing is interesting enough to ask the question.
The proposed union initially received significant attention. Some of the conversation surrounding it became intertwined with the NewJeans dispute and, inevitably, with the enormous pro-HYBE and anti-HYBE fandom war happening online. And that’s where K-pop frequently confuses people: something can look like a massive movement online and turn out to have almost no institutional support whatsoever.
Thousands of angry tweets are not union members. Millions of views, hashtags, and an anti-HYBE movement are not automatically a labor movement. If the workers themselves aren’t signing up, all that noise doesn’t mean very much — ten people saying they were interested and two people actually filing paperwork is basically that entire dynamic in miniature.
Maybe the Biggest Idols Are the Wrong Place to Start
When we talk about labor problems in K-pop, we naturally talk about idols because they’re the people we know.
But K-pop isn’t composed exclusively of idols. There are dancers, stylists, makeup artists, hair teams, touring staff, production crews, session musicians, choreographers, managers, junior employees — and unlike idols, many of these workers have problems that are considerably easier to standardize.
So maybe Korea’s entertainment labor movement shouldn’t begin with the giant philosophical question of whether every K-pop idol legally be considered an employee. Maye it should start with standardized pay for backup dancers, health benefits, and overtime pay.
Start With the Backup Dancers
Imagine starting with dancers.
A minimum rehearsal rate. A minimum performance rate. A clear payment schedule. Overtime compensation. Meal allowances. Transportation after extremely late rehearsals. Cancellation fees. Basic injury and safety protections. Suddenly, the demands become incredibly boring, and that’s good, because “everyone working this 14-hour production day should receive a meal” is a much easier proposition to organize around than “let’s restructure the legal relationship between every Korean entertainment company and every celebrity.”
Get dancers accustomed to collective standards. Then perhaps stylists organize. Maybe makeup artists establish standards. Maybe touring workers do it. Maybe smaller performers eventually begin demanding similar protections. You build a culture in which collective bargaining becomes normal rather than attempting to launch an industry-wide revolution overnight, and I think the cultural part of this matters more than people give it credit for.
You Can’t Ignore Korean Workplace Culture — or the Money Behind It
South Korea has hierarchical workplaces. Seniority matters. Age matters. Company loyalty matters. Competition is intense, particularly in entertainment, where thousands of people are waiting for the opportunity someone else has.
That makes organizing difficult on its own. But there’s also a financial structure underneath it that makes idols specifically reluctant to rock the boat.
One management industry official put it plainly: it can cost anywhere from 5 billion won to 20 billion won — roughly $3.5 million to $14 million — to debut a single group. Companies shoulder that investment up front, and idols essentially accept a deal that runs on an all-or-nothing basis.
Momoland’s Hyebin talked about this directly in a YouTube video about why idols don’t make money. At most companies outside the very top tier, she explained, the cost of lessons, food, housing and practice-room rentals during the trainee period gets charged back to the idol after debut. It’s deferred payment. You debut already carrying hundreds of millions of won in debt.
A professor who studies the industry, Kim Jung-sup of Sungshin Women’s University, framed the root problem as trainee periods that run too long inside a relationship that’s structured as a hierarchy rather than an equal partnership. And culture critic Bae Guk-nam pointed out that contracts themselves are often vague about where investment costs end and profit-sharing begins — which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that turns into a dispute the moment an idol actually becomes successful.
So: if you’re a backup dancer who believes there are 500 people willing to take your job tomorrow, you’re probably not going to be the first person standing outside company headquarters with a megaphone. And if you’re a rookie idol who trained for six years, finally debuted, and is already hundreds of millions of won in the hole to the company — are you really going to risk becoming known as “difficult” three months in?
This isn’t something you change with one press conference. Cultural change usually happens slowly, so start small. Establish one protection. Normalize it. Establish another. Eventually, something that once seemed confrontational simply becomes the way the industry operates.
Which Is Why Going Public So Early Seems Like a Strange Strategy
This is probably the biggest strategic question I have about the attempted idol union.
Why were we hearing so much about it before they apparently had the idols?
Union organizing usually begins quietly for a reason. You identify workers. You talk privately. You figure out whether they actually share the same problems. You establish trust. You determine what people are willing to fight for. You build an organizing committee. You get commitments. You figure out the legal strategy. And only after you have actual collective power does the public spectacle become useful.
This seemed to happen the other way around. We got headlines about Korea’s first idol union. We got interviews. We got into a discussion about what it might mean for the industry. And then, apparently, almost nobody joined — and the labor office spent nine months sending the application back for missing paperwork before it was quietly withdrawn. That’s not collective bargaining. That’s a press release looking for a constituency.
Are Idols Even Legally Allowed to Unionize? The Answer Might Be Yes
The obvious objection to an idol union is the one that came up with Hanni: idols aren’t legally employees, so how could they unionize like employees do?
But there’s a 2018 Korean Supreme Court ruling — involving the Korean Broadcasting Actors Union — that complicates that objection. The court found that broadcast performers could qualify as “workers” under the Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act even when they weren’t exclusively contracted to one broadcaster and even when their income didn’t primarily depend on one company.
The court’s reasoning was essentially that the practical need for performers to negotiate from an equal footing with broadcasters mattered more than whether they hit the technical boxes of exclusivity and income dependency. That matters because it suggests “worker” isn’t one fixed legal category in Korea. Someone can fail to qualify as an employee under the Labor Standards Act — the law that would have protected Hanni from workplace harassment — while still potentially qualifying as a worker under trade union law, which governs the right to organize and collectively bargain.
In other words: the legal door to an idol union may already be open. Nobody walked through it with enough people behind them to matter.
It’s also worth noting Korea wouldn’t be inventing this from scratch. Hollywood already has a working model in SAG-AFTRA, which represents roughly 160,000 actors, singers, dancers and other performers — most of whom aren’t famous at all, and many of whom are freelancers bouncing between productions rather than salaried employees of one studio.
That’s a different structure than “everyone works for the same boss,” and it’s the closest real-world proof that an industry like this one can unionize despite the freelance, star-driven mess of contracts underneath it. How they actually built that — and what of it could realistically translate to K-pop — is a big enough question that it deserves its own piece.
The Failure Doesn’t Mean K-Pop Doesn’t Need a Union
If anything, I think this failed attempt tells us something useful.
Korean entertainment probably does need stronger collective labor structures. But maybe the first attempt tried to jump directly to the glamorous part — it wanted the headline: K-POP IDOLS FORM A UNION. What it needed first was the boring part: workers sitting in a room, comparing pay, talking about schedules, figuring out which problems they actually share, building trust, quietly gathering support, deciding what they’re willing to risk. And only then going public.
Labor movements aren’t created because an idea gets good press. They’re created when enough workers decide that they have more leverage together than they do separately. Maybe K-pop doesn’t need to begin with its biggest stars demanding an industry-wide revolution. Maybe it starts with 20 backup dancers agreeing that everyone deserves a minimum rate, transportation home after midnight and something to eat.
That wouldn’t generate nearly as many headlines. It might actually generate a union.
