Labor and management organizations and researchers gathered at the National Assembly Members' Office Building. It was a forum on improving foreign employment policy arranged by the Ministry of Employment and Labor on the 12th. About 1.1 million foreigners work in Korea, but the system that receives them is still scattered by visa type.
Being scattered does not end as a matter of administrative convenience. The ministry in charge differs depending on which visa a person received, so the office that decides how many workers to bring in, the office that looks after where those workers live and what they learn, and the office that prevents unfair treatment each operated separately. A person's day is not divided that way, yet the system alone was divided.
Vice Minister Kwon Chang-jun of the Ministry of Employment and Labor said a perspective that views introduction, utilization, residence support, and settlement as one is needed. He also stated his intent to open opportunities for growth to low-skilled workers and a path to stay longer for workers who have built up skills. Reworking the Employment Permit System while looking after both the human rights of migrant workers and the jobs of domestic workers is the principle the ministry put forward.
The diagnosis of Lee Kyu-yong, senior research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, who delivered the presentation, pointed in the same direction. Visa and residence management and labor market policy run separately without being connected to each other. He proposed moving policy that had concentrated on bringing people in toward using them well, and tying five stages, from introduction and selection to initial adjustment, skill formation, career development, and return and settlement, into a single management system.
Roh Yong-jin, professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, said the classification itself should be changed. In place of the existing method that has divided workers into professional and non-professional, he called for using three tiers of simple labor, mid-skilled, and high-skilled jobs. The grounds he cited are changes on the ground. Places where workers are hard to find are spreading beyond simple tasks to skilled technical jobs, and cases in which workers who entered on E-9 visas take on mid-skilled work without it being recorded on paper are confirmed in many places, he said.
At manufacturing, shipbuilding, and agriculture and livestock sites, these workers are called core personnel. But the blueprint of the system is fitted to simple labor jobs. Complaints that people with skills acquired over several years leave when their period of stay ends, and workplaces repeat the teaching from the beginning, have continued for a long time.
The ministry ran an integrated support task force from December last year to February this year, and held two forums last month as well. It plans to release an integrated support roadmap for foreign workers within the first half of the year, including the opinions raised that day. Some view June as the point of confirmation, but no specific date has been set. The labor and management organizations and experts gathered that day agreed that operations crossing ministry boundaries, and a support system that embraces every migrant worker without exception, are needed.
The scale of 1.1 million has now become an everyday matter difficult to treat as an exception. For people who eat in the same factory and meet the evening in the same alley, how many axes policy is divided into is likely beside the point. It remains to be seen how much the roadmap to be announced next month narrows that gap.
