A Study on Migrant Labor Market in South Korea : Focusing on German Model
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Lee Jueun 
Published: June 2018

The global flow in the 21st century came to greet numerous changes with being progressed the direct & indirect coexistence and psycho-social cohabitation among people who have diverse cultures and histories based on country. In addition, the global flow in modern times is being actively progressed even the transfer of labor power along with the internationally active transfer of capital and finance. Accordingly, the population of 213 million people(about 3.1%) among about 6.9 billion people as the whole world population in 2010 became the international floating population. This is a change in migrant labor market for solving imbalance in labor power and capital among countries owing to the phenomenon of being lacking in simple labor power of the advanced countries and to the balanced dispersion of excessive phenomenon in labor of the underdeveloped countries. Diverse problems were caused in this process. The movement of population is originated from the characteristic of being drifted by which ‘a person’ becomes the center unlike capital. Hence, each country is devoting itself to efficiency of migrant labor market by solving a temporal problem of being lacking in labor of own country and minimizing a conflict in order to be reasonable for a special situation of own country.
Even Korean society is flowed in diverse global changes with entering the rank of the advanced country. The industrial field within South Korea, which achieved economic revival in the 1990s, came to be driven even to a situation of threatening existence of company as well as a drop in productivity while being decreased domestic people who are employed by small and medium companies into which the low-wage jobs are driven owing to polarization of labor market. Hence, the exhaustion of laborers with low wage and low expert came to be appealed. The government did spread policy of allowing simple migrant workers to flow in on a large scale as an alternative plan for this. It supported the demand and supply for insufficient manpower of small and medium companies while carrying out the employment permit system, abolishing the industrial trainee system, and enforcing the working visit system, with beginning from the industrial trainee system in 1993 for allowing these people to be settled in society. As a result of spreading this policy, the national statistical office in 2010 announced that migrant workers within South Korea outnumbered 910,000 people. This was said to be numerical figure that was increased by just about 69% compared to the year in 2005. These changes allowed South Korean labor market, which had cried out for single race and pure blood, to have diverse confusions and shocks, and numerous problems.
A rapid increase in migrant workers of Korean society brought about the effect of creating profit in some parts in labor market of small and medium companies that are placed in labor famine while causing social benefits and costs at the same time. However, the occurrence of social costs at the same time led to a problem about which the burden is completely shifted to people. In other words, South Korea’s labor market was biased the economic profit according to a rise in scale of migrant workers to enterprisers while losing balance as a whole. On the other hand, the wage and job of the domestic manpower, especially, manpower in vulnerable class who are placed in low-wage market, were driven to very unfavorable situation. Thus, problems were caused such as making inroads into domestically youth job, mass-producing a number of the unemployed, barrier of entering labor market in the disadvantaged groups, a drop in wage, promoting social polarization caused by this, and mass-producing poor people. Also, a rise in influx of simple migrant workers for small and medium companies led to the phenomenon of hindering the highly industrial restructuring owing to the maintenance in a type of depending on low expert.