In contemporary global era, international material and personal exchanges are extremely active. Moreover, number of workers who have left their own countries and provide or have been providing their manpower to the business or the workplaces located in the other countries for the purpose of getting wage, the foreign workers, are gradually increasing. As we have entered into the multi-cultural society as of present, we should continuously make efforts, for the sake of their human rights protection and its promotion, by seeking the way to improve the system and policy more efficiently after analyzing and considering various problems raised from work scenes.
Therefore, the following remedial measures on foreign worker’s rights protection are hereby suggested as an alternative:
First, regarding three labor rights of foreign workers, the rights will be truly guaranteed only if the independence of enjoyment for three labor rights of unregistered foreign workers is recognized.
Second, the current ‘laws on employment of foreign workers’ that excessively restrict the freedom of workplace transfer or of paid activities must be fundamentally revised in order to exclude any possibility that downscales various working conditions and forces them out to illegal situations by deserting from workplaces.
Third, to guarantee foreign worker’s rights to health, the foreign workers must be provided of medical services for neglected class of people, vaccinations and worker’s compensations without any obligation of notifying and must be able to practically buy health insurance through the measures such as health insurance fee reduction for financially embarrassed foreign workers.
Forth, rights to health for dependent foreigners in the Immigration Processing Center should be guaranteed to the extent of that of domestic convicts and furnishing a surety on emergency treatment must be prohibited.
Fifth, the system must be improved to allow children of unregistered foreign workers to enter the schools without providing any certificate on immigration or on alien register so their actual rights to education can be assured.
Sixth, the children’s access rights to education must not be segregated and a curriculum for the children must be considered and the integration in the true sense of word must be achieved at a place of education by respecting their cultural identities.
Seventh, to assure the most basic human rights of foreign workers, rights to family union must be promised for them to live humanly and happily in any country that they are working at with their families at any time they wish.
Outside of that, constructions and services of administration must be revised to the purpose of the law by supplementing the law system for foreign workers not to get discriminated for vocational rehabilitation trainings under the Workers’ Compensation Act and foreign workers must be included in recipient’s list on the Employment Insurance Law in principal and disadvantages from a stay for certain periods should be supplemented and if foreign workers have requested for a vocational training or a retraining, either Employment Approval Policy should be complemented for them to be excluded from the objects to be deported by considering requests for change in business or workplaces or basically the Employment Approval System should be changed into the Work Permit System.
Moreover, according to the need of human rights devices with rather detailed and binding legal grounds in national level for foreign workers protection, we should ratify ‘International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers And their Families’ which has been chosen and effectuated by UN so that we raise ourselves to be a country where has taken a major step forward by promising the human rights of foreign workers.