Blind masseurs in South Korea protest

Police arrested 26 protestors who threatened to jump from a bridge after the government decided to allow sighted individuals to be licensed as masseurs.

Since 1963, the law allowed only blind people to practice the profession, Yonhap said.

The protesters said the new policy puts their jobs at risk. There are about 15,000 licensed masseurs in the country, which has a blind population of 216,000.

"Medical massage is almost the only profession that is open to the blind people. The ministry's decision is threatening our right to live," Shim Wook-seop, one of the protesting masseurs, was quoted as saying.

Another blind masseur, Dong Seong-geun, staged a lone protest in front of the Constitutional Court recently.

"I have a wife and two children to support," he told the New York Times.

"If I lose this job, I will have to beg on the streets. How can taking away one job from people who only have one compare with taking one job away from sighted people who have a hundred jobs to choose from?"

The country's Constitutional Court is expected to rule soon on an appeal filed by several sighted people who argued that the profession cannot be the exclusive domain of the blind.

The Massager Association of Korea, representing 120,000 unlicensed masseurs who are working openly and in defiance of the law, is leading the legal challenge.

via cnn.com