Amnesty seeking UN help on abuses of migrant workers

By Jung Min-ho

Amnesty International will highlight the dire human rights conditions endured by migrant workers in South Korea to a number of organizations concerned with monitoring such issues, its officials said Friday.

“Amnesty will be raising the concerns and recommendations outlined in the report with international bodies including the United Nations,” Amnesty’s East Asia press officer Tom Mackey told The Korea Times, Thursday.

Representatives from the international human rights organization and the Ministry of Labor met on Wednesday to discuss the matter, but the meeting ended without any “meaningful results” having been reached, according to sources.

During the meeting, Amnesty staff brought up the issue of human rights and the “abusive conditions,” under which workers from countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam are subject to forced labor and lack the means to escape the situation.

In its recently published report, “Bitter Harvest: Exploitation and Forced Labor of Migrant Agricultural Workers in South Korea,” Amnesty called on the Korean government to monitor the agriculture industry more closely.

“There are approximately 20,000 migrant agricultural workers in South Korea, with many arriving from Cambodia, Nepal and Vietnam under the Employment Permit System (EPS) migrant workers scheme,” the report says. “The majority take on huge debt equivalent to two years’ salary in their home country in order to get a job in South Korea.”

But the ministry promised nothing to improve the conditions for workers, let alone end the problem, which has long been ignored here.

“We made our counter-argument against their claims that many immigrant farm workers in Korea suffer from abuse,” said an official from the ministry. “Nothing meaningful came out of the meeting.”

The report notes that the EPS, which was set up in 2004 as a means of better managing the increasing number of unskilled laborers coming to Korea, is heavily biased in favor of employers, leaving migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation and other forms of abuse.

According to the report, significant numbers of migrant agricultural workers have been trafficked for forced labor and incidents of contractual deception were recorded in all cases investigated by Amnesty.

The report also shows that migrants are compelled to work under conditions that they did not agree to, under threat of various forms of punishment including: intimidation, violence, being assigned bad housing, forced to work an excessive numbers of hours, no days of rest in the week and denial of paid overtime.

Based on interviews conducted over the course of 14 months, the report says the laborers work more than 10 hours a day and sometimes much more, and receive only two days off per month or less.