The foreign labor force in South Korea is not being distributed where needed, with figures pointing to a heavy imbalance in the hiring of professionals, research results by a think tank showed Monday.
According to a report by Hyundai Research Institute, commissioned by the justice ministry, of the 629,671 foreign workers in South Korea as of the end of November, only 7.8 percent were working in professional categories, such as universities, research institutes, and arts and entertainment.
Within this group, 33.4 percent were hired to teach conversational foreign languages, compared with 5.4 percent as college professors and 6.4 percent in research fields, the report found.
Despite the larger number of foreign workers allocated to nonprofessional jobs, the allocation of the workforce has not been effective, the report said.
The worker shortage in the manufacturing, construction and accommodation sectors, for instance, grew from 120,119 in 2006 to 135,688 in 2014, it said. The shortage in the accommodations segment was heavier, more than doubling from 5,740 to 11,884.
Nonprofessional foreign workers are hired according to quotas set by the government after reviewing labor shortages in each industry, a system that is unable to solve problems appropriately, according to the report.
"The lack of menial laborers at the country's small and medium-sized manufactures is chronically high, but the current employment permit system restricts the yearly input of foreign workers and their distribution in each industry," the report said. "It is operated on quotas, which cannot promptly be applied to industries that lack manpower and doesn't take into account the needed training period.
"The policy on foreign workers needs to be modified to become more comprehensive and solve the problem in which untrained workers are brought in large numbers and put in short-term jobs," the report said. (Yonhap)