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A Human Rights Approach to Migrant Worker Housing: Migrant Workers in the Employment Permit System

  • Journal of Human Rights Studies
  • Abbr : JHRS
  • 2023, 6(2), pp.189-243
  • DOI : 10.22976/JHRS.2023.6.2.189
  • Publisher : Korean Association of Human Rights Studies
  • Research Area : Social Science > Law > Law of Special Parts > Human Rights / International Human Rights Law
  • Received : November 20, 2023
  • Accepted : December 15, 2023
  • Published : December 31, 2023

이기호 1

1동북권 서울특별시 노동자종합지원 센터 노동권익개선 팀장

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study acknowledges that migrant workers' housing is a long-standing social challenge, and seeks to identify the causes of migrant workers' housing distress below the minimum standard and to explore ways to address them. This paper examines the entire process of migrant worker housing under the Foreign Employment Permit System. I tried to analyze its structure with a descriptive approach including a normative approach, which is called an integrative approach. The research methodology was based on the analysis of literature including international norms, previous studies, and national legislation on the right to housing, as well as individual and group interviews with 15 migrant labor experts and interpreters based on Mark Frezzo's “rights cycle” theory and “rights bundle” (a chain of rights conditions, rights claims, and rights effects). Through this process, it was found that addressing the root causes of migrant workers' housing problems requires not only legal and institutional improvements to secure migrant workers' housing rights, but also improvements in the institutional preconditions for structural transformation as a cause of the problems, and that their implementation is possible with a “bundle of rights,” or “migrant workers' housing rights bundle,” of organic connections that cut across the usual categories of rights. Therefore, based on this theoretical analysis, we propose a “migrant workers' housing rights bundle” as a set of “principles” to solve the migrant worker housing problem, and emphasize that “mandatory migrant worker housing provision” should be the direction based on the foundation of these principles.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.