September 17, 2025
SEOUL – In October 2024, Bishal B.K., a 28-year-old Nepali, arrived in Korea with two goals: To earn money and to gain skills to support his family back home.
For seven months before his departure, he attended a language academy in Nepal to study Korean, hoping the investment would ease his transition to living and working here.
But the reality was far harsher than he had expected. Under the conditions of his visa, he was assigned to work at a metal company, where he was given plating work. The job required repeatedly lifting and carrying heavy metal parts, which eventually led to a hand injury. On top of the physical impact, he said he was verbally abused, beaten with a shoe and even had hot coffee thrown in his face.
He told his employer that he wanted to leave, and the boss stopped giving him work.
“He stopped paying me and refused to grant permission for my transfer to another company,” he said.
When the Nepali worker went to his office to confront him, the boss responded by filing a police complaint for “obstruction of business.” Police warned that if he returned, he could face deportation. The Ministry of Labor offered little support, advising him to“sort it out with the boss.”
“I came here to work. But now I have no job and should live with false accusation,” he said.
Bishal B.K.’s story echoes many others among the some 340,000 migrant workers who are in Korea on the Employment Permit System.
The system was introduced in 2004 to help small and medium-sized businesses address labor shortages by hiring workers from foreign countries that had signed prearranged agreements with the South Korean government.
It replaced a problematic previous system that often led to illegal work, in which workers entered legally but left their assigned workplaces in search of higher pay outside the system, losing labor protections. To prevent this, the new system restricts job changes while requiring employers to provide standardized employment contracts and compulsory social insurance coverage, including workers’ compensation and return travel insurance.
EPS workers are only allowed to transfer to another workplace with their employer’s consent, except in limited cases involving proven abuse or legal violations.
Even with the employer’s consent, a worker can only change workplaces three times in the first three years, and twice more if their stay is extended. In cases of abuse or harassment, workers must prove it through lengthy investigations. In practice, this leaves the worker in limbo — unpaid or under threat of deportation while cases drag on.
The risks of abuse faced by migrant workers under this system have been reported before, but a recent case sparked nationwide outrage. A video in July showed a Sri Lankan man who was strapped to pallet of bricks being lifted off the ground with a forklift at a factory in Naju, South Jeolla Province.
President Lee Jae Myung said, “This is an intolerable act of violence against a vulnerable minority and a blatant violation of human rights.”
Attorney Kim Chun-ho criticized the framework.
“Requiring a worker to get the employer’s consent to change jobs is absurd. It creates fertile ground for abuse,” he said. “Some employers even demand money in exchange for permission. There are workers who pay hundreds of thousands of won just to escape.”
Even if workers file an official complaint, he noted, the process takes months to conclude. “You need evidence and investigations don’t end the next day. In the meantime, workers often go months without wages.”
Islam MD Shohidul, 27, from Bangladesh, came to Korea in May 2022. While working at a manufacturing factory in Pocheon, Gyeonggi Province, in 2024, he dropped a wrench that crushed his toe, shattering the bone.
“At first, the boss told me not to report it as an industrial accident and not to tell friends,” he recalled. Only with the help of peers did he receive insurance coverage. After two months in the hospital, he returned to the factory, but persistent pain made heavy work impossible.
Earlier this year, he asked to transfer.
“The boss said, ‘You came to Korea because of me, so you cannot go elsewhere,’” he said. But the boss stopped assigning work and did not give permission to extend the visa or to find another job.
With his family back home relying on him, returning to Bangladesh was not an option. He now survives on friends’ support.
Cases of abuse against migrant workers like Bishal and Shohidul are not uncommon.
This year, a Nepali farmhand died by suicide after months of reported abuse. In Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, a Vietnamese construction worker died of heatstroke. Only his Korean colleagues had been allowed shorter hours.
In Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, a Vietnamese woman in her 20s was assaulted by a manager. But despite that, a transfer to another workplace was not immediately granted. In her case, she was required to prove abuse because she had already made the maximum number of three workplace transfers.
In August, Suwon District Court sentenced the employer to a year in prison for the assault.
Udaya Ray, a Nepali migrant worker and head of the migrant workers’ union, said, “The government should guarantee the freedom to change workplaces and punish violence and harassment.”
“Migrant workers are not machines or slaves. They are workers and human beings. Human beings — not just a labor force — came to this country. But all the discriminatory laws and institutions set by the government treat them as if they were slaves.”
The growing number of cases prompted the president to intervene.
“Discrimination and violence are unforgivable crimes,” Lee said, ordering ministries to propose countermeasures at a senior staff meeting this month. “As a nation that has become a cultural and trading powerhouse, Korea cannot tolerate foreigners living here being treated unfairly.”
But officials also signaled that the core requirement — employer consent — would remain intact.
“We are considering strengthening criteria for abuse cases,” said Lee Hye-young from the Labor Ministry. “But we are not planning to remove the employer’s approval requirement.”
Officials worry that if workers are granted greater freedom to change jobs more easily and seek better conditions, possibly in urban areas, the system’s original purpose of addressing severe labor shortages in physically demanding jobs and less populated regions could be undermined.
“I have never once changed workplaces since coming to Korea. Even when the work was tough, I thought I should remain loyal to the boss who brought me here. But now the pain is too severe for me to keep doing the same job,” said Shohidul. “I don’t understand why the boss won’t allow me to work somewhere else.”
