The Fight for Equal Rights: The Power of Foreign Workers in South Korea

Abstract

On September 9, 1997, the South Korean government announced that, under certain conditions, foreign workers would be granted the same basic labor rights as domestic workers: the rights to organize, to bargain collectively, and to strike. Foreign workers were also accorded the same protections under the Labor Standard Law, the Medical Insurance Law, and the Industrial Disaster Law that native Korean workers receive; and they given were the right to severance pay and a vacation allowance.1 A little more than one year later, in October 1998, the government extended some of these protections to illegal foreign workers as well.2 Despite obvious limitations (not the least of which is that simply passing a law does not guarantee meaningful change), these two announcements were extraordinary. For the South Korean government did something few other governments have; namely, it established a basis for one of the most historically disempowered and subordinated of groups foreign migrant workers to achieve legal equality with native workers. Just as importantly, the Korean government's decision significantly enhanced the (potential) capacity of foreign workers to exert control over the labor process. That is, the government gave foreign workers a legalinstitutional basis for increasing the price of their labor, gaining protection against exploitative employers, and (perhaps most importantly) securing better lives for themselves and their families. In this respect, the government's decision undermined the raison d'etre of employing foreign migrant workers in the first place: that is, establishing an easily exploited, extremely low cost, and disposable source of labor.