Foreign workers underpaid

By Jhoo Dong-chan

Migrant workers here are paid much less than Korean workers and the wage gap between the two groups is the largest among OECD member nations.

According to the OECD Employment Outlook 2015, Wednesday, native-born workers receive wages 1.55 times higher those of foreign-born employees.

Korea was followed by Italy, where native employees get 1.32 times greater wages than foreign workers, and Spain, 1.31 times. In the U.S., native-born workers receive 1.16 times more wages and Germany, 1.13 times.

In Japan and Poland, foreign workers receive more wages than natives, but the countries having small numbers of foreign workers do not yield meaningful statistics, the data show.

The report showed that most of the wage disparity comes from differences in skills. But still, even considering this gap, migrant workers in Korea face discriminatory treatment with regard to wages, experts say.

“The nation’s employment permit system guarantees foreigners equal pay for equal work,” said Lee Chang-won, a researcher of IOM Migration Research and Training Center.

“In reality, however, many workplaces do not pay them equally because most foreign workers are not as skilled or as productive as native workers.”

Kim Yoo-sun, a researcher at Korea Labor and Society Institute, claims that “prevailing racism in the Korean labor market” is another factor.

“Korea has a wage disparity between men and women, between those who are highly-educated and those are not, and between regular and non-regular workers. Disparity based on race also exists,” Kim said.

More than 10 years have passed since Korea first started inviting foreign workers to fill a labor shortage, but the country still does not consider their rights, Kim noted. “Such sentiment delayed the launch of the Migrants’ Trade Union for 10 years.”

Lee also said that the government does not consider foreign workers as settlers who will live in Korea without jobs but as workers who will return to their home countries after their contract is over.

Separate domestic data by the National Statistics Office (NSO) last year showed that around 60 percent of the foreign workers received less than 2 million won ($1,678) per month.

Many migrant workers here also worked over 50 hours per week last year, while the nation’s legal weekly number of working hours is set at 40 under the Labor Standards Law.

Experts agree that their working environment is below OECD labor standards and they only receive 80 percent of native workers’ wage while doing the same job.