Foreign Worker Employment · Employment Permit System
Foreign Worker Employment
What is foreign worker employment under the Employment Permit System?
- An employment permit process that presupposes efforts to hire domestic workers first
- Work restrictions and reporting duties tied to the residence status continue
- The keys: applying labor law and making safety training effective
What the Employment Permit System really changes is the order and timeline of hiring. You can't simply hire when you need someone. You register the opening on Worknet, complete the domestic recruitment-effort period, and receive an employment permit. Only after the sending country's procedures and the entry and job-orientation training are done are workers placed on site. Plan on several months from application to deployment and work backward when setting your production plan and headcount plan. If you try to fill an immediate vacancy through this system, you will usually miss the window. A permit is issued per workplace and does not follow the worker.
Start by getting the residence status categories straight. The Employment Permit System covers Non-professional Employment (E-9) and Visiting Employment (H-2). Specialist workers (E-7) and part-time work by international students follow entirely different procedures. An employment contract is, in principle, signed for an initial period of up to 3 years and extended through a re-employment procedure, and changes of workplace are also limited in number except where the employer is at fault. Responsibility for insurance is split: the employer takes out departure guarantee insurance and wage arrears guarantee insurance, while the worker takes out return cost insurance and accident insurance. Permitted industries, quotas, and requirements are updated every year by public notice, so check the current year’s criteria.
Working conditions cannot differ by nationality. The minimum wage, overtime and night-shift premiums, annual leave, and industrial accident insurance apply exactly as they do for Korean workers, and dormitory costs may be deducted only with the worker’s consent and within the officially notified cap. Arbitrarily deducting room and board and treating the remainder as wages is a classic path to unpaid-wage violations. Use the standard employment contract and give the worker a copy in their native language—it is the cheapest way to reduce disputes.
Penalties usually start with 'just for a moment.' The moment you send workers permitted for manufacturing to an affiliated warehouse or a construction site for even a few days, it becomes activity outside their residence status. The worker faces fines and residency problems, while the employer faces revocation of the employment permit and a restriction on new hiring for a set period. Sending surplus workers to another company adds illegal dispatch on top of that. Treating safety training as done once Korean-language signatures are collected is another common misunderstanding. If an accident occurs, it won't count as training delivered. Forget that the reporting duty lies with the employer and leave a resignation or a worker's disappearance unreported, and that alone becomes grounds for penalties.
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultant
Jongmu KimCorporate talent development and job competency specialistThe Employment Permit System, established under the Act on Foreign Workers’ Employment, etc., sets out procedures that require employers to try to hire Korean workers first, along with employers’ management obligations.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, an auto parts manufacturer (58 employees, annual revenue of about KRW 12 billion (≈ US$8,978,000)). Nine production positions on its machining line had been vacant for 6 months and were covered by overtime. Over the past 3 months, only 2 domestic candidates had applied. The HR manager began looking into hiring foreign workers.
- The HR manager posted an opening for 9 production workers on Worknet and met the 14-day recruitment-effort requirement. Of the 2 candidates who came to interviews, only 1 showed up for work.
- At the Employment Center, the team was told, 'Even if you apply now, actual placement will be 4 months away.' The production team lead pushed the second-half volume plan back by one quarter.
- When using the standard employment contract, they brought in an interpreter to read the housing deduction and shift hours aloud line by line, and gave the worker a Vietnamese copy before signing.
- Two months after the workers joined, an affiliated logistics warehouse asked to 'borrow them for a month.' The HR manager declined, based on advice from the company's labor attorney.
- After the company switched safety training to native-language videos and a forklift signal picture board, all 6 workers stayed. Average monthly overtime fell from 32 hours to 12, and there were no accidents against 7 near-miss reports.