Labor will set you free from deportation.
Park Kwang-soo (Counseling Team Intern)
It is said that the following sentences were engraved in large letters on the main gates of concentration camps (in other words, extermination camps) in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen operated by the Nazis during World War II. ‘Arbeit mahct frei.’ Translated into English, “work will set you free.” Twice a day, prisoners who had to see this phrase as they walked in and out of the main gate of the camp for forced labor said they felt deeply insulted. It was because the smoke that burned the prisoners was constantly coming out of the chimney of the gas chamber built behind the main gate.
It can be said that labor certainly freed the prisoners there in two ways. The prisoners, weakened by repeated forced labor, were selected from the daily roll call and gained ‘freedom from the camp’ through the gas chamber chimney. In addition, as long as the prisoners maintained the stamina to continue working in the harsh camp life, they were able to achieve ‘freedom from death’. (Obviously, ‘Premo Levi’, who survived the concentration camp, is the second case. those who fall under the .)
A migrant worker from Nepal who had been habitually abused by a Korean boss came to the point that one day, the boss assaulted him for defective products. You can’t keep working for a company that might be attacked again sometime. He went to the boss and asked him to move to another company. Then the boss said that he couldn’t move, and if he didn’t want to work here, he had to choose between returning to Nepal or working for another company as an illegal immigrant.
Not surprisingly, it is a reasonable idea you can have as a business owner. This is because the current Employment Permit System gives employers the right not to change the workplace of migrant workers, that is, to force them to work at their own workplace. Because there is no reason not to exercise the right to work migrant workers!). Therefore, employers can confidently claim against migrant workers. If you don’t want to work for this company, go back to your country.
The government’s coercive crackdown on and deportation of undocumented migrant workers is fulfilling its role as a mechanism to further strengthen the rights of employers. In order to not have to run away from the pursuit of the Immigration Office Enforcement Team, to avoid jumping off a four-story building, to be able to walk confidently on the street, and to live freely in this land from the fear of crackdown and deportation Even if they are subjected to violence, discrimination, etc., they have to endure it and work.
If the proposition that ‘work will set you free’ is applied to Korean migrant workers, it cannot be denied that it is exactly the same as that of the Nazi concentration camps. Unless workers’ right not to work, that is, ‘freedom from work’ is not guaranteed, the Employment Permit System will not be free from the yoke of the ‘Slave Permit System’.