Rethinking disability employment in the digital era: remote work, employment quotas, and intermediary structures in South Korea

This study examines how remote work, embedded within South Korea’s disability employment quota system and mediated by intermediary agencies, reshapes the labour experiences of workers with disabilities. In-depth interviews with 28 remote workers with disabilities reveal everyday work processes and organizational relations. Participants experienced organizational disengagement and procedural neglect reflecting employment practices oriented towards formal quota compliance. Remote work was treated as sufficient reasonable accommodation, obscuring ongoing needs and shifting responsibility onto workers. Intermediary agencies facilitated employment access yet reproduced low-skilled, low-wage, short-term trajectories while weakening peer networks and collective protections. This study demonstrates how digital transformation can produce novel patterns of labour market exclusion, highlighting the need to reconsider employment-based social protection systems such as disability employment quota systems.