법은 큰 강이다. 그 강은 없는 자에게도 흘러야 한다. - 이흥재 교수님 사회보장법 수업 인터뷰 자료집 분석 -

Abstract

Despite the devoted efforts of hidden specialists group on social security, most of

Korean legislations on social security through the military dictatorial regime of

ex-presidents Park Jeong-hee and Jeon Du-whan could not go beyond the category

of nominal legislations with the purpose of mitigating the complaints of the lower

classes and obtaining the legitimacy of the regime. Due to the weakening of the

characteristic as a right and low level of benefits, the accumulation of court decisions

on social security was very slow. In light of this fact, a qualitative study on

the reality of social security through personal interview could be a good way of

grasping the actual effectiveness of social security law. Concerning this, it is very

encouraging that many interviews on the beneficiaries of social security benefits

have been accumulated by many students in the Professor Lee Heung Jaes social

security law classes of Seoul National University. Through the analysis of the ten

volumes interviews during the past 15 years, this thesis tried to describe the aspects

of changes of social security reality during the past 15 years.

The analysed interviews consist of 227 cases : 56 cases (24.7%) on the elderly,

52 cases (22.9%) on the disabled, 55 cases (24.2%) on poverty problems, 7 cases

(3.1%) on the homeless, 15 cases (6.6%) on industrial accident, 11 cases

(4.8%) on children and juveniles. The conclusions of the analysis are as follows.

First, the trend of improvement of social security benefits in the long run is

acknowledged. Spread of welfare services closely linked with livelihood beyond

simple economic support, improvement of medical and educational services on the

poor, betterment of educational services on the disabled children and transportation services for the disabled, the massive appearances of people engaged in welfare

areas and increase of their roles, the increase of demand for independent life by

industrial accident victims and the disabled who have been isolated in institutions or

home in the meantime and etc. are good examples. However, these positive

changes are not sufficiently supported by the legal system due to some limitations

as follows. Too narrow gap between common benefit and conditional benefit weakens

the beneficiariess desire to work. The government is not active in offering jobs

to the disabled, and there is no effective method to cope with the governments violation

of the compulsory employment rate for the disabled employees. The law on

industrial accident compensation insurance seems focused mainly in compensation

itself and could not cover the re-socialization of victims.

Furthermore, we need to pay attention to the fact that in reality, problems such

as poverty, disability, aging and industrial accident are overlapping. For example, an

industrial accident victim usually ends up being disabled and suffers from poverty.

In the poverty-stricken home, child is likely to be exposed to many problems and

the elderly are likely to be abandoned. In order to cope with these problems, more

detailed welfare delivery system needs to be established and more comprehensive

welfare services fit for beneficiaries needs to be provided. In the administration of

social security policy, the beneficiaries personal dignity should be respected

carefully. For instance, rental apartment for the poor has stigma effect and many

young students who are residing there feels shameful. The elderly suffer not only

from poverty and health problems but also from loneliness.

In our analysis, we could also recognize the changes in the attitudes of the interviewing

students as well. Although there are some considerable differences between

students, the early interviews tend to show that interviewers consider the beneficiaries

as subjects for their research and fix their interviews according to their own

knowledge and view on social security. They are mainly interested in economic level

of benefits. But more recent interviews try to represent the beneficiaries independent

point of view by using direct quotation or summarizing the interviews

matter-of-factly and their interest go beyond economic dimension and extend to personality-

related dimension such as cultural life of the poor, stigma effect caused by social security benefits, loneliness, the infringement of personality through

disability rating and etc.