K-pop's first idol union signed up two people. Both of them founded it.

Bang Min-su, who performed as C.A.P. in the group Teen Top, has abandoned his attempt to form Korea's first labour union for idols, he told the Korea Herald in an interview published on Monday.

The Idol Labour Union Establishment Preparatory Committee had two members when he stopped: Bang, and Seo Min-seon, the Democratic Party policy researcher who proposed it. The pair filed a union establishment report with the Labour Ministry's Seongnam office in September. Nothing came of it.

That is the whole of organised labour representation in a business where HYBE alone reported revenue of ₩1.45tn (about £715m) for the three months to 30 June, a company record, in results published on 28 July.

Korean performers sign management and service agreements rather than employment contracts, which leaves them outside the Labour Standards Act. Lee Jong-im, a researcher at Kyung Hee University, told the Korea Herald that contracts signed by child and teenage performers are frequently not treated as employment contracts at all.

Bang Min-su spent a year trying to organise Korean performers. The reason it failed is the same one that ended Hanni's harassment complaint in 2024.

The Labour Ministry applied that reasoning in November 2024, when it dismissed a workplace harassment complaint brought by Hanni, then a member of NewJeans, on the ground that she did not qualify as a worker under the Act.

The distinction decides what is available to a person. A worker can bring a harassment claim, pursue unpaid wages and join a union with legal protection. A contractor negotiates alone, against a company with a legal department.

Bang described a recruitment problem with no way out of it. Performers who succeed acquire enough independence that a union stops being useful to them, he said, while those who do not succeed depend on their agencies for everything and cannot afford to be seen signing.

He said public hostility deterred others who had considered it, and he was direct about the rest: a gap in values between himself and Seo, and doubts about whether he was the right person to lead it.

Contractor status is not an absolute bar to organising, and Bang knew it. He said he looked at SAG-AFTRA in the United States and at Equity in Britain, both of which bargain for large numbers of self-employed performers. Each works inside a legal framework built to allow it.

Korea has built something else. Revised standard contracts for entertainers and trainees took effect on 1 January under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, tightening the window in which damages must be paid, extending mental health provision beyond severe depression and requiring agencies to appoint protection officers for minors.

Every clause of it arrived by ministry template. None was negotiated by anyone sitting on the performer side of a table, and a template can be rewritten by the next ministry without consulting one.

Performers have found another channel. The Fair Trade Commission opened an investigation into HYBE and its ADOR subsidiary on 4 June following a complaint by Danielle, and her lawyers have asked the regulator to examine the penalty clause used across exclusive contracts rather than her case alone.

That route runs through competition law rather than employment law, which means it can reach a contract term but not a working condition. It also depends on a regulator choosing to look.

Bang testified at a National Assembly forum in September 2024 on the labour rights of child and teenage performers. Those are the members he could not recruit.

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