Nepalese woman assists migrant workers with understanding Korean labor law

Posted on : 2017-10-29 13:08 KST Modified on : 2017-10-29 13:08 KST
Sunita Pandey is translating the Act on Foreign Workers’ Employment for the benefit of her compatriots in the country
Migrants Trade Union Director Udaya Rai speaks during a meeting with the non-profit education groups the Good Education Research Institute and Limefriends about the “Multilingual Translation Project” at the union’s office in the Eunpyeong District’s Bulgwang neighborhood of Seoul on Sept. 27. (provided by Migrant Dandelion)
Migrants Trade Union Director Udaya Rai speaks during a meeting with the non-profit education groups the Good Education Research Institute and Limefriends about the “Multilingual Translation Project” at the union’s office in the Eunpyeong District’s Bulgwang neighborhood of Seoul on Sept. 27. (provided by Migrant Dandelion)

In recent weeks, it has become more common for Sunita Pandey, the 40-year-old who runs the Cheongju Nepal Shelter in the city of Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, to stay up all night working. Her desk is stacked high with A4 pages containing the Act on Foreign Workers’ Employment. Sunita is translating the act into Nepalese, referring to the Korean language original and the English language translation provided by South Korea’s Ministry of Employment and Labor. Her goal is to explain the “employment permit system,” which is based on this law, to migrant workers from Nepal.

Sunita came to South Korea with her husband in 2006 to do a graduate program in computer science at Chungbuk National University. She started helping her Nepalese compatriots who were struggling with the employment permit system and eventually opened the Cheongju Nepal Shelter in 2012. She started translating the law last month. Last summer, Keshav Shrestha, a Nepalese who was working at a manufacturing facility in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, ended his own life. In his suicide note, Shrestha wrote about his job-related stress and explained that he hadn’t been able to transfer to another factory or to get medical care in Nepal. Sunita was reminded of the Nepalese who had suffered hardship because of the employment permit system. She figured they would need to know the law if they were going to deal with it properly.

“Since opening the shelter, I’ve been getting between 30 and 50 phone calls a month about work-related inquiries. There are so many people desperate to escape their job that they end up paying their employer between 2 or 3 million won to change their place of employment. When migrant workers who aren’t very good at Korean are treated unfairly, they don’t understand what went wrong or what their rights are, so they don’t even know that it’s illegal [to give money to their employer],” Sunita said.

This is the first time for the entire text of the law to be translated into languages such as Nepalese and Bengali. The South Korean government only provides an English-language translation of the full text of the Act on Foreign Workers’ Employment. When migrant workers enter South Korea, they are only educated for a brief time on partial sections of relevant laws for 16 hours during three days spent at a job training center designated by the South Korean Ministry of Education and Labor.

Though legal passages are difficult for even South Koreans to understand, Sunita says that “translation isn’t that difficult.” She became familiar with the law while doing volunteer interpretation for the immigration office and while providing counseling on labor issues. And referring to documents that contain selected passages of key parts of the law translated by civic groups is helping her compile a variety of hitherto scattered resources.

Several like-minded organizations are taking part in Sunita’s project. Immigrants' Advocacy Center Gamdong, which provides migrants with legal services, is providing the consulting necessary for interpreting the law. The Migrants' Trade Union has taken on Nepalese and Bengali translations of the Immigration Act, which regulates immigration issues for migrant workers.

“Even when there are problems with the law itself, there are a lot of people who just think they have a bad employer for the simple fact that they don’t understand what the law says. When people who are subject to the law don’t understand the issues with that law, they aren’t even able to protest properly,” said Udaya Rai, chair of the Korean Migrants’ Trade Union. Migrant Dandelion, a human rights watchdog for youth migrants in Cheongju, and the Good Education Research Institute, a non-profit educational organization, are also helping out with the translation work.

Once the translation is completed in December, the translated laws will be posted to a mobile application and website. The plan is to use an app and web platform developed by the startup Limefriends, which was already working on a social corporation based on a similar idea. “Once the app and website are complete, we’re planning to let anyone who meets certain requirements participate in the legal translation, which will take advantage of collective intelligence,” said Jung Yeong-chan, president of Limefriends.

The goal of the project is to translate the laws that migrants need into 13 languages by next year. Sunita also wants to expand the scope of the translation to laws related to refugees. “I hope that the information in the laws that have been translated like this will be shared widely through word of mouth by many migrant workers, including those who visit the shelter,” she said.

By Ko Han-sol, staff reporter

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