K-pop executive Min Hee-jin has resigned as a director of Ador, the label she co-founded with HYBE, while also vowing to “take necessary legal actions one-by-one against the numerous illegal activities of HYBE and its associates”.
The resignation came as South Korea’s Ministry Of Employment And Labor closed an investigation into allegations that Ador-signed NewJeans were victims of workplace bullying on the basis that the band’s members are not employees of their label.
In a scathing letter announcing her resignation from the Ador board, Min claims that “HYBE’s atrocities in 2024 will be recorded as an unprecedented case in K-pop history”.
Min has been an outspoken critic of HYBE ever since the company made it clear that it wanted her out as CEO of Ador. Those problems began, says Min, only after she sent two formal “internal whistleblowing emails” in April raising concerns about the conduct of other HYBE execs and subsidiaries, and HYBE began an internal audit into her own conduct.
After she was pushed out of her CEO role in August, Ador and HYBE hoped Min would stay on in a creative role leading recording and touring projects for NewJeans. She immediately rejected that proposal and insisted she wanted the CEO job back.
She had hoped, she says in her letter, that “HYBE would admit their mistakes”. However, “far from showing remorse”, she continues, HYBE “committed the unprecedented folly of fabricating baseless falsehoods and even publicly displaying a shameful illegal audit”.
In September, after the Ador board reappointed Min as a director of the label, apparently in the hope that doing so might placate her, Min continued to push to be reinstated as CEO, launching legal proceedings seeking an injunction forcing her reinstatement. However, that attempt failed, with a court in Seoul refusing to issue the injunction.
Concurrent to all that, Ador said it had improved its offer to Min for her to continue producing NewJeans’ projects. But, in her resignation letter, Min says that Ador in fact presented her with a contract “full of toxic clauses as if they were doing me a huge favour”.
For their part, the current Ador management have issued a much more muted response to the resignation letter, stating, “Ador is regretful about board member Min Hee-jin's unilateral decision to quit the company. We will provide the best support so that NewJeans can grow and develop”.
At various points as the Ador drama has unfolded, HYBE has tried to convince its employees - and shareholders - that its high profile feud with Min will soon be over. However it doesn't seem likely that the controversy is going to subside any time soon, despite Min’s resignation - especially given her pledge to “take necessary legal actions”.
The label also needs to figure out how its working relationship with the members of NewJeans will now progress, given they have supported Min throughout the debacle.
The band members have also been critical of Ador management, post-Min, as well as executives in other parts of the HYBE group. That criticism got a particularly public airing during a livestream by the band in September, as well as at a hearing in the South Korean parliament, where NewJeans member Hanni spoke about bullying in the music industry.
During that session, Hanni claimed that HYBE execs deliberately gave members of NewJeans the “cold shoulder” when they were at the company's HQ, and that they had bad-mouthed the group on an internal communications app and had asked a journalist to downplay the success of the group’s record sales. Hanni concluded “the company hated us”.
That prompted fans of NewJeans to file a petition with the South Korean government claiming that the group’s members were victims of workplace harassment.
However, the country’s Ministry Of Employment And Labor has said that it can’t investigate those allegations because the members of NewJeans are not employees of their label. Instead they are independent contractors working under a revenue share agreement.
Chunghwan Choi at Yulchon law firm in Seoul told the BBC that, for the government ministry to intervene, the NewJeans members would need to be defined as workers under the Labour Standards Act.
To meet that definition they would need to have “fixed working hours” and be “providing labour under the employer’s direct supervision and control”, which they are not. K-pop stars, the lawyer added, “are typically classified as independent contractors”.
Very few artists and musicians are employees. Frontline artists often run their own companies, hiring the services of a manager and entering into partnerships with other music businesses. Other musicians usually work on a contractor basis.
And while the relationship between K-pop artists and their management companies, or “agencies”, is a little bit different to what is the norm in most other markets and genres - with the agencies usually having a lot more power over artists than a traditional manager or label might in the UK or USA - it’s still not usually an employer/employee relationship.
While South Korea’s Ministry Of Employment And Labor have chosen not to investigate this time, it seems likely the concerns that have been raised about bullying in the K-pop industry will continue to be discussed in political circles. And NewJeans’ fans will remain critical of Ador and HYBE for the foreseeable future. Whether that will have any long term impact on either brand remains to be seen.