Should Foreign Workers in Korea Get a Lower Minimum Wage? A Debate Lesson
No — Korean law sets one minimum wage for every worker regardless of nationality, but a 2024 Seoul pilot bringing in Filipino caregivers reopened the argument, and your high schoolers already have an opinion on it.
Park English2026-09-232 min read
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In late 2024, Seoul brought in a small group of Filipino women through a government pilot program to work as household caregivers, part of an effort to ease the country's childcare crunch. They were paid Korea's standard minimum wage, which is set and published annually by the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Some employers said that rate made the whole program pointless — you could hire a Korean part-timer for the same money. Some worker advocates said the wage was still too low once you counted housing and food costs in Seoul. And a few lawmakers floated the idea openly: what if migrant workers were paid less than the legal minimum, to make hiring them worth it?
That last idea goes against the Minimum Wage Act, which applies the same floor to every worker in Korea, foreign or Korean. But the argument keeps resurfacing anyway, and it is a genuinely useful one for a high school class, because your students have relatives who hire domestic help, and some have part-time jobs of their own where they compare their hourly rate to everyone else's.
Why this works as a lesson
High schoolers already sense the unfairness angle instinctively. They just need the vocabulary and a structure to argue it properly.
Pros and cons to put on the board
| For a lower migrant wage | Against a lower migrant wage |
|---|---|
| Makes hiring migrant caregivers financially realistic for average families | Same law should protect every worker, no exceptions |
| Could bring in more workers to fill a real shortage | A lower legal wage invites abuse beyond just the wage itself |
| Some workers still earn more than at home, even below Korean minimum | Two wages for the same job undercuts Korean workers' pay too |
Running the class (45 minutes)
- Warm-up (5 min). Ask: "Have you ever been paid less than you thought you deserved?" Let two or three students answer before you introduce the topic.
- Set-up (8 min). Explain the Seoul pilot in three sentences. Pre-teach minimum wage, caregiver, loophole, exploit, shortage.
- Table read (5 min). Hand out the pros/cons table. Students add one point of their own to each side.
- Structured debate (20 min). Split the room in half, assign sides regardless of personal opinion. Each side gets two speakers, two minutes each, then open floor.
- Reflection (7 min). Ask students to write one sentence: what they actually believe, now that they've argued the other side.
One thing worth admitting: this debate gets tangled fast if students start comparing it to their own part-time convenience-store wage, which is a different legal question entirely. Redirect them back to migrant labor specifically, or the lesson turns into a wage-complaint session with no structure left.