그들은 왜 쉼터를 들를 수밖에 없는가? : 네팔여성이주노동자의 고용불안정, 전략적 대응, 그리고 정체성을 중심으로

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article focuses on the question of ‘why Nepalese women migrant workers have no choice but to return to the shelter’. To answer this question, researchers conducted a four-month observation and interview at the Nepalese Women Migrant Workers Shelter in Suwon. Nepalese women migrant workers carry out various practices to overcome and resolve the employment permit system, but in the end, these efforts are limited. The continuous return to the shelter implies this limitation. The first limitation experienced by Nepalese women migrant workers is that strategic solidarity with other foreign workers in the shelter is impossible and that it is not connected to Korean labor organizations or labor movements. Secondly, their response is just negotiations with individual actors such as employer and employer’s wife and not toward the employment permit system, which is the root of the problem. Also, they were experiencing a simultaneousness of plural identity in Korea, where conflicts and contradictions between the two identities as worker and Nepalese women emerge. By linking the identity of the worker to the present and “Nepalese women” to the past and the future, they were rationalizing the gap between two identities as separate coexistence. The efforts of Nepalese women migrant workers to seek the meaning of labor do not lead to more widespread solidarity and active resistance to the given conditions, ending up rendering Nepalese migrant workers to return to their shelters.