Foreign Workers’ ‘Dream’ Pops
Min Seong-jae
Min Seong-jae. 2002. “Foreign Workers’ ‘Dream’ Pops.” JoongAng Daily, December 11, 2002.
ecember 11, 2002 — Practical Korean for some foreigners in Korea: “We are human beings too,” “Please don’t hit me.” Some of the illegal foreign workers residing in Korea actually practiced these phrases before they came here. Others reportedly have been instructed on how to hold back if they receive slaps on the face while working in Korea.
Foreign workers who left their homes for a “Korean dream” suffer from miserable working and living conditions and human-rights abuses. They are subject to overwork, low wages or late payment, violence and industrial accidents. Koreans’ prejudice against foreign workers, furthermore, aggravates their hardship.
Edy Santosa, 25, is an Indonesian who used to live in Ansan, in the southwestern outskirts of Seoul, where 11,000 small manufacturing factories are concentrated. He came to Korea a couple of years ago as an “industrial trainee,” the Korean government’s foreign workers employment scheme.
After working briefly at a factory that manufactured bed frames, he suffered a ruptured spinal disk and was immediately fired. He took jobs in several other factories, but in doing so he became an illegal foreign resident, because the official trainee program had sponsored him only for the bed-frame factory.
Mr. Santosa’s back got worse and he needed an operation. But with no health insurance and meager wages, he could not afford the 13 million won ($10,700) cost.
Mr. Santosa has not told his parents that he was hurt in Korea, so that they would not worry. “I miss my family in Indonesia, but I will not go back with no money and only a sick body,” he said.
But that’s what he did. He was taken in by the Ansan Migrant Shelter, which gives help to Ansan-area foreign workers. There he was joined and consoled by other illegal foreign workers. But he left for Indonesia last month when his back became seriously ill. His days in Korea were miserable, Mr. Santosa said.
According to the Ministry of Justice, approximately 350,000 foreign workers resided in Korea as of August. Among them, only 69,700 are legally permitted to work here, and 280,000, or 77 percent, are illegal workers. They either left the official industrial trainee program or are illegal entrants. Foreign workers come from 92 countries, of which China and South-east Asian countries account for most; ethnic Koreans from China take up more than half the total. Most foreign workers are employed in the so-called “3-D” industries (dirty, dangerous and difficult). Thirty-five percent work in low-paying manufacturing jobs, 22 percent in construction, 14 percent in restaurants and others in farming and fishing. Their average monthly salary is 800,000 won ($650).
According to the “Report on Migrant Workers in Korea” published by the Joint Committee for Migrant Workers in Korea, they work, on average, 64.1 hours per week, 20 hours more than the legal limit. Most work overtime and some even work for 36 consecutive hours. Many — 3,585 — fall victim to industrial accidents, and 130 died between 1998 and 2001. About half the accidents took place within one year of the foreign worker’s arrival. Most of the accidents are attributed to the absence of safety measures in factories. And few illegal foreign workers ever receive appropriate compensation.
A couple of decades ago, Korea used to send its people abroad as miners, nannies and construction workers. Now it has become a host country. As Korea’s economy develops and sectors such as high technology and services increasingly constitute the Korean economic structure, more Koreans are avoiding the 3-D jobs. Small and midsized manufacturing and construction companies have difficulty finding Korean workers, so they depend on foreign ones.
For many Southeast Asians and Chinese Koreans, Korea appears as a land of opportunity where salaries can be 10 times higher than in their home countries. As long as small Koreans firms need blue-collar workers and foreigners will trade their labor for better wages, the number of foreign workers will further increase.
But concerns come in with the workers. Some Koreans argue that the foreigners disturb the Korean labor market. Experts counter, however, that many small and midsized firms would have been forced to close without foreign labor. A more serious problem is that most of the foreign workers are illegal, unprotected by labor law and vulnerable to human-rights abuses — to the damage of Korea’s national image.
The Korean government tried to regulate the immigrants through its foreign industrial trainee system, under which the Korean Federation of Small and Medium Business recruits workers and assigns them to enterprises for one year.
Seol Dong-Hoon, a sociology professor at Chonbuk National University who has analyzed the scheme, says that it has brought three problems: illegal stays, human rights abuses and corruption in the selection of trainees.
The scheme accepts only a small number of trainees for a short time, paying small wages. Thus, the accepted trainees tend to abandon the program for better pay elsewhere, and thereby become illegal. Second, illegal workers are not protected by labor law, leaving them vulnerable to inhumane treatment by Korean employers, sometimes including withholding of wages. Third, foreigners pay vast sums of money to brokers when they come to Korea. To repay the debt, they often seek higher-paying illegal work.
The foreign trainees experience a wide variety of abuses. Some brokers or employers extort their money, confine them in a small room under surveillance or force women into prostitution. Korea now is a country practicing what some observers have dubbed “modern slavery.”
Many developed countries, including Germany, Taiwan and Singapore, have imported foreign labor, but many of them treat foreign workers better. Germany guaranteed their rights as early as the 1950s. Taiwan and Singapore have adopted an advanced “work permit system“ that guarantees full labor rights for foreign workers.
Trade unions and civil organizations have fought to protect foreign workers’ rights and to reform the government’s labor policies. Their call for a work-permit system or “employment license system,” under which licensed companies that meet certain conditions could hire foreign workers, has been turned down by the government. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy and the Ministry of Justice along with some small businesses said the plan would increase labor costs and labor disputes.
The government announced that it would forcibly deport all illegal foreign workers by next March, but recently it revoked the plan after strong protest from small businesses. Now the workers are still supposed to leave, but not for another year.
The government also an-nounced a foreign workers recruitment scheme. About 50,000 ethnic Koreans overseas will be permitted to enter Korea to work in the service industry over the next couple of years. But the plan applies only to ethnic Koreans overseas.
Korean citizens’ attitudes toward foreign workers aggravate the problem. In addition to exploitation by cold-hearted employers, even ordinary citizens often despise foreign workers.
A worker from Bangladesh said, “it is difficult to befriend Koreans. I think they avoid me, probably because I am from Bangladesh. If I came from the West, they would have become my friends.”
Foreign workers, usually poor and with darker complexions, say they are looked down upon by many Koreans. They say they experience wide varieties of racial discrimination in restaurants, public baths and subways. Some Southeast Asians reportedly have been turned away from public baths because the owner feared that their darker skins might contaminate the water.
This kind of prejudice leads foreign workers to think that Korea is a country economically advanced, but socially still backward. Thus they do not readily assimilate into Korean society, but regard Korea only as a place for earning some short-term money.
An elderly Chinese couple who visited the Seoul Red Cross Hospital said, “All my relatives are here in Korea. But I will go back to China after all. Korea is a good place for people who have some money, but not for us.” by Min Seong-jae iamfine@joongang.co.kr
