I am a young person trying to understand the world I am about to enter. That is not a disclaimer. That is the entire point.


The world is changing how it works, landing hardest on people my age. Employers are automating the entry points. Demographic decline is redrawing labour markets across Asia. Gig platforms are building workforces without building protections. And the traditional deal between effort and reward — the one that told generations of young people that credentials lead to security — is being rewritten without our input, often without our knowledge, and almost never with our voices in the room.


I built the Work and Power desk at KYN because I am tired of reading about my generation as a data point.


Labour journalism has a problem. It is written, largely, by people who already have stable jobs — about people who do not. The workers who most urgently need their conditions named and interrogated are the same people too exhausted, too precarious, and too busy surviving to stop and write about it. I know this because I am one of them. And I know that the gap between what is being covered and what is actually happening to young workers in Asia is not a minor oversight. It is a structural failure.


KYN's motto is "The world, as seen by the young." Work and Power takes that mandate and runs it straight into the hardest questions. What does fairness look like in a labour market built on platforms and algorithms? What happens to prestige when AI rewrites which professions survive? Who benefits when a generation quietly reroutes its ambition — and who designed the conditions that made rerouting feel necessary?


These are not abstract questions to me. They are the questions I wake up with.


I have spent years watching how inequality reproduces itself inside systems designed to prevent it. How even communities built around fairness develop concentrations of power. How trust gets constructed — and destroyed — in the absence of formal protections. And how the people with the least leverage are, almost without exception, the last to have their experience treated as worth reporting.


That background made me a particular kind of reader of labour news. When employment among South Koreans aged 25 to 29 fell by 98,000 in a single quarter [2] — the steepest drop in over a decade, in a country already projected to lose half its workforce over the next 40 years [1] — I did not just see a statistic. I saw a generation being squeezed from both ends: automation removing the roles that were supposed to be their on-ramp, and employers raising the bar to fill whatever was left [3, 4]. I saw young people doing the math in real time and quietly changing their plans [5].


One of my earliest interviewees captured something I had not yet found the words for. A Korean student studying in the United States told me that even though AI would likely replace many lawyers, he viewed the profession as more prestigious now — not less. His reasoning: if AI thins the field, those who remain are the ones who could not be replaced. Scarcity as a new form of status [6]. I could have filed that quote under "youth resilience" and moved on. Instead, it stopped me. Because it was not optimism. It was a structural argument made by someone doing rigorous, lonely thinking about his own future — with no guarantee it would work out. That is the kind of thinking this desk exists to take seriously.


The name of this desk is not accidental. Work is what this generation is trying to find, hold, and make meaningful. Power is what determines who sets the terms of that search — and whether those terms can ever be revised in our favour.


I believe they can. I believe journalism that names structures, refuses to treat precarity as inevitable, and insists on young people as analysts rather than subjects is not just good reporting. It is a form of accountability. And I believe that accountability starts with showing up — consistently, rigorously, and with genuine stakes in the outcome.

I have stakes in this. We all do.


The world is being renegotiated. Work and Power is here to cover the terms — and to make sure the people most affected by them finally have a seat at the table.


Work and Power publishes every Wednesday and Friday. Tips, questions, and story suggestions can be sent to jaewon.hwangg1@gmail.com.