"You gave your life to work! Poor Koreans who come to this distant land to earn money... Please let me in. Even if I die, I have to find the body. Please. Please allow me."
This is the ambassador shouted by nurse Youngja in the movie'International Market', which recorded 14.26 million people in 2014.
Miners were trapped inside the collapsed tunnel, but German managers weren't taking rescue measures for safety reasons. At the moment of crisis, Youngja shouted, and many viewers cried at the scene where the miners broke through the barriers for safety and went to rescue Deoksu and Dalgu Spilled.
In the'Korean Workers' Grief-Miners Who Goed to Germany' posted on the official blog of the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the sorrows of hardened foreign workers are written.
On April 6, 1965, a strike broke out in a mine.
Most of the miners refused to enter after a miner was beaten to break his nose for being uncooperative with German workers.
Seeing the demands of miners reported in the press at the time, I feel sad.
1. Don't treat me as a foreigner!
2. Greet the perpetrators!
3. Give us the right job!
4. Reveal the facts of the interpreter who exploited red pepper powder from Korea and resign!
In the 1960s, West Germany had a shortage of miners and nurses, so it requested dispatch to the Republic of Korea.At the time of accepting this request, the Korean government agreed with West Germany for the employment of Korean-German workers (韓獨勤勞者採用協定, German: Anwerbeabkommen zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Südkorea). Signed.
From 1963 to 1977, there were 8,395 miners and 13,71 nurses who went to Germany after signing a three-year employment contract, so more than 1,000 young Koreans worked as migrant workers in other places every year.
Today, 50 years later, the Republic of Korea is not a sending country that dispatches workers to foreign countries, but has become an introduction country that receives workers from 16 countries.
The governments of 16 countries that have signed an agreement with the Korean government send 200,000 workers to the Republic of Korea.
This year marks the 16th year since the employment permit system in accordance with the'Act on the Employment of Foreign Workers' enacted on August 16, 2003 was implemented.
It is hard to be a worker abroad.
As did miners and nurses in South Korea 50 years ago, 200,000 foreign workers from 16 countries working in Korea are also in a similar situation.
"We didn't come to die" This is the
slogan they shouted at the cultural festival held by foreign workers on December 18, last year, on World Migrant Workers' Day.
In Korea, where three workers die a day at work, the high incidence of industrial accidents among foreign workers, which are assigned only to workplaces where Korean workers are reluctant to work, is inevitable, as in the comment below in my article.
▶ [In-It] "We Didn't Come to Die" The
miners who suffered from hard labor in the 1000m underground camp.
It cannot be called'discrimination' for foreign workers working in Korea to work in difficult and dangerous workplaces like nurses who had to do hard work in hospitals such as wiping bodies.
However, something that even miners and nurses did not experience 50 years ago is frequently happening to foreign workers working in Korea in 2020.
It is'delinquent wages'.
Looking at the status of reports of delinquent wages for foreign workers submitted by the Ministry of Employment and Labor on October 13, Mi-hyang Yoon of the Democratic Party of the National Assembly Environment and Labor Committee, the amount of reports of delinquent wages for foreign workers in Korea surged every year, surpassing 100 billion won for the first time in 2019. .
Would it be fair for foreign workers to suffer such damage in the'Wage Delinquent Republic', where the reported amount of unpaid wages has already exceeded 1 trillion won since 2016?
This cannot be dismissed because foreign workers who work through the Employment Permit System are determined by the government of the Republic of Korea (Ministry of Employment and Labor) to designate their workplace.
It is unfair to ask foreign workers who do not have the freedom to choose their workplace to take care of the damage of unpaid wages.
However, the Korean government has not been able to come up with proper countermeasures.
After 4 years and 7 months of living in a green house and working on a farm, the story of a foreign worker who was not properly paid for more than 3 years was reported on the news, and the government of the Republic of Korea (Ministry of Employment and Labor) did it It was only a two-page paper called'Confirmation of Overdue Wages for Business Owners', which was investigated and verified ex officio.
The Icheon Police Department, which investigated the criminal case accused of employment fraud, was sent as a non-prosecution opinion on the grounds that it did not pay wages from the beginning, and the prosecutor in charge of the Yeoju Branch Office of the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office attached it to criminal mediation with the intent to receive even part of the unpaid wage.
However, on the 26th (Mon), the government of the Republic of Korea (Ministry of Justice) refused to extend the status of residence (visa) for the foreign worker.
The reason for the extension of the status of residence is that'the victim is only a third party in a criminal case.
It was confirmed that the land, which was the only property of the farmer who offered to pay the overpaid wages by selling the land, was already handed over to auction two years ago, and even in the criminal mediation procedure conducted by the prosecutor's office, the farm owner could not provide even 1 million won. There is no possibility that foreign workers will be reimbursed for damage because the social safety net related to wage arrears, such as the micro-liquid allowance system, is not in operation because it is a farm where only five workers are always working.
In the movie'International Market', the reality of the victims of foreign workers is desperate like a moment of despair, when miners are trapped in a collapsed tunnel and German managers are not taking rescue measures for safety reasons.
The foreign worker, who was forced to return empty-handed without even being allowed legal stay, shed tears on the way home after receiving the notice of disapproval.
Like the Russian proverb, "Tears of others are no different from water," we are just watching the tears of foreign workers very embarrassingly.
However, for the families of foreign workers who look at this, the tears will not simply be water, but bloody tears.
In the movie'International Market,' it is like the tears shed by Yeong-ja, a paddock nurse, screaming toward Deoksu, a paddock miner trapped in a tunnel.
* Editor's Note:
Attorney Jeong-gyu Choi has been working for the socially underprivileged by defending the case of △fire at the Goyang reservoir, the case of a migrant woman worker victimized by sexual harassment and domestic violence, and the case of slavery at the Shinan salt farm.
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