Expulsion of Korean Nurses from West Germany

This article was written specially for ISIS by Won-Hea Feussner-Kang of the Korean Women's Group in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a resume of the information
contained in their recent booklet, Dokumentatlon which not only gives details about the situation and action of Korean nurses in Germany, but also reproduces much of the correspondence between the group and the various ministries and officials of the German Government. It also gives a full report of the two-day Munster public meeting referred to below in the text. This is the full story of how migrant women have fought for their rights. Dokumentation is available in German from the address below.

Patients in the hospitals in Munich are not being adequately cared for because of a shortage of nurses. The newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung has recently reported four times about the "alarming situation" in Munich clinics where doctors and nurses have refused to treat some patients because they are overworked.

Yet between 1977 and 1978 there were numerous news paper reports about the increasing number of unemployed German nurses. According to these reports the number of unemployed nurses increased to 56 per cent in Bavaria and 41.8 per cent in another part of Germany. The Abendzeitung, a Munich newspaper, reported that by 1982 there would be a surplus of more than 80,000 nurses in the whole Federal Republic of Germany. So the South Korean nurses, brought into Germany during the 1960s when there was a lack of nurses, had to go home. "We are very sorry", said officials, "but German nurses have to get jobs first".

What happened during those two years? Was it a question of miscalculation, or a failed computer? We do not think so. We are convinced that it has been a German Government policy to regard South Koreans as a reserve labour force, to be called upon in times of need, and to be sent home in times of unemployment. In the middle of the 1960s the South Korean and German Governments carried out an intensive recruitment campaign for Korean women to work in Germany. The Korean Dictatorship needed the German foreign exchange which the Korean nurses sent back to their families (estimated to be about 50 million DM annually). Then, when the "oil crisis" came in the mid-1970s, the German Government, sensing the  antagonism of their population to foreign workers, decided to send us home.

In 1977 Korean nurses and nursing auxiliaries were discharged throughout Germany. The excuse was that there were enough German nurses for hospitals. But we were not prepared to go home without protest. We knew that we had the right to stay and work here as long as we wanted to because we had already worked in Germany for many years. Without us the hospitals could not function. We knew from past experience that when vacancies arise on the staff of hospitals they are not filled. The German nursing staff have to work harder and Korean nurses are dismissed in order to cut down expenditure on the health service, and the service deteriorates.

South Korea: the background

In South Korea women have very limited education possibilities. For Korean families, priority in education is always given to the son, and school fees are very high. Traditionally, and even today, Korean parents think that their sons will take care of them eventually, and that their daughters will get married so it is not worth investing in them. Many Korean girls are expected even to work to pay for their brothers' education. Because of this, and the difficulties of finding a job in South Korea, many of us felt that going to Germany would be a wonderful solution. But we had to be trained first in Korea, in special schools set up for the purpose, and this was very expensive. On arriving in Germany our entire wages for the first six months had to go to paying off the debt we incurred for the training course.

Conditions in West Germany

In Germany we encountered many problems. The first and most difficult one was language. Korean and German are very different, and the training we received prior to coming here lasted only a short period — from one week to a maximum of three months. Language is very important in hospitals. Unlike factory workers, we work in teams in a continuous rota. Our German colleagues had no time for us because of the work load, yet we were expected to do as much as they, even though this was impossible because we could not make ourselves understood most of the time. This meant that we were outsiders from the very beginning, and we felt very insecure. Thus we were frequently allocate the tedious jobs of bed-making, feeding and cleaning. Yet we could not speak with the German nurses about our problems, our disappointment and our insecurity.

An additional disadvantage for us is that we have been educated as women. This means that we are not used to speaking about our feelings: disappointment and anger and sorrow. This and the language problem helped to create a wall between us and our German colleagues.

When off-duty we were afraid to go out walking or shopping. Could we go out alone as women? What would we do if a man spoke to us? What do people think when they see an Asian person? We were very scared. And we were deaf and dumb. We could not read newspapers or books. We could not listen to the radio or television. We could not go to the cinema. All the usual forms of entertainment were out of reach for us because of language. This meant total isolation from life and society, and was inevitably a great psychological strain for us. Some of us went back to Korea. Others had break-downs and had to have psychiatric treatment. Some of us struggled on and are still working.

Another feature of our life in Germany is our constant contact with the office for foreigners. We get our residence and work permits from them. We were dependent on them at the beginning for information. We had to believe them. Later we found that they were withholding information from us. They had never told us about our rights as workers, about unemployment benefit, about holidays. We had done nothing about this because we did not know what our rights were.

Action: the Korean Women's Group

The greatest degradation for us was the expulsion order. When we went to the office for foreigners to renew our residence permits, we were told "marry a German if you want to stay here", or "you can go to Northern Germany and get a job there". We felt this as a real attack on our dignity. So we started an action to collect signatures in support of our case.

We faced great difficulties. On the one hand it was not easy for us to go into the street. Somehow we had an antipathy against political activities because of our education. On the other hand we had no knowledge about laws for foreigners or about the way the office for foreigners would react to us. Then we were confronted by the enormous problem of changing German public opinion which considers that foreign workers take jobs away from Germans. The media and the politicians have certainly helped to aggravate this situation.

In spite of all these problems we managed to collect over 11,000 signatures from March 1977 to January 1978. Our arguments were:

1. To return home would mean unemployment and material poverty for us, because there is no organized health service in our country which could offer us work. (Training schools for nursing auxiliaries we(established in South Korea, whose sole purpose was  to train Korean women for employment in German hospitals, and whose certificate is otherwise worthless since the post of nursing auxiliaries does not exist in Korea). 

2. We would be torn away from the social ties which have meanwhile been established. In our own country we would have difficulty in re-adapting ourselves to social and cultural life there. 

3. The non-renewal of our residence permits makes more work for the German nursing personnel and a deterioration of the care provided for patients.

We were supported by various groups including colleagues in hospitals, representatives of Protestant and Catholic churches, the trade unions and women's groups.

Armed with these signatures and financial backing from the Caritas Association, we held a two-day public meeting in March 1978 in Munster, to which we invited the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs and the German Hospital Society, together with many nurses, and journalists from different newspapers and television stations. It was a great success. Many newspapers and television and radio programmes reported on the meeting. The representatives from the various ministries and associations all recognised our protest. We demanded unlimited permission to reside and work in the Federal Republic with the right to continue to work, even for those of us who had not been in Germany for five years. Part of this demand was later recognised.

Above all, we had a great sense of working together as women and discovering that only if we do that can we be successful. We are determined to protest if there are injustices against us. After this public meeting, we came together as an active organization which before then had existed (since April 1976) mainly to give seminars for Korean women in Germany.

In March 1978 we read about the Dong—II Textile workers in South Korea. These women had been expelled from their factory because of their participation in the labour union elections (see ISIS Bulletin No. 10). They had been terrorised and attacked. We, as a Korean women's group in Germany, wanted to show our solidarity and started an action for collecting money. We are still continuing our action.

Presently we are also supporting the action of Korean miners in Western Germany who are collecting signatures in order to protest against their appalling working and living
conditions, and their unjust employment contracts. 

For further information on the activities of the Korean 

Women's Group in Germany, write to:

The Korean Women's Group in West Germany

c/o Won-Hea Feussner-Kang,

Adizereiterstr. 15,

8000 MiJnchen 2,

West Germany.

Tel: 089/725 17 55