Nearly 40 percent endure physical assaults in Ansan
By Park Si-soo
Six years have passed since the government opened the labor market wider to foreigners by adopting the Employment Permit System (EPS) with more than 164,000 foreigners working in Korea under the program.
But there are still few signs of progress when it comes to their welfare in the workplaces, a survey showed, Tuesday, with migrant workers’ human rights remaining largely ignored.
According to a survey of the Asan Migrant Workers’ Center to mark the 6th anniversary, nearly 40 percent of migrant workers in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, have suffered physical and verbal abuse at work.
More than 70 percent of them found their actual working conditions inferior to the contract terms they had signed. One fourth said they had not received medical checkups on an annual basis, which is illegal.
More than 30 percent said their passports, bank account details and other private goods were being kept by Korean employers, a measure to keep them from running away.
Thirty-three percent of the surveyed said they sleep in steel containers or conference rooms despite paying to move in to a company-associated residential facility.
The survey sample was small ― 83 workers in Asan ― so it’s hard to say that this is the situation facing the majority of migrant workers in Korea, said Lee Won-Kyu, a center spokesman.
“It’s meaningful in that it allowed us to peek into the working conditions of imported workers here,” Lee said.
Last October, Amnesty International urged Seoul to set tighter measures to guarantee better working conditions for migrants.
The human rights watchdog reported that many migrant workers in Korea are abused, trafficked for sexual exploitation or denied wages despite the introduction of rules for their protection.
Amnesty added these workers often have to operate heavy machinery or work with dangerous chemicals with little or no training or protective equipment, and suffer a disproportionate number of industrial accidents.
For instance, a Filipino, surnamed Alan, lost one of his fingers on his right hand in September 2007 during the operation of heavy machinery.
Unpaid or overdue wages are also emerging as headaches, human rights activists said.
In 2008 alone, 6,849 migrant workers filed complaints with the labor ministry over delayed wage payments for unclear reasons, up from 2,249 cases in 2007, statistics show. By June last year, 4,659 complaints of this kind had been lodged ― from the latest data available ― indicating a worsening situation.
The amount of unpaid salaries has soared ― accounting for 4.4 billion won in 2006, 17.3 billion in 2008 and 12.1 billion won for the first six months of last year. The labor ministry said it aims to deal with the problems, but admitted putting all problematic firms on its watch-list is all but impossible.
“We are intensifying inspections,” said Shin Dong-jin, a labor ministry official in charges of migrant worker-related issues. “One thing clear is that employers who intentionally ignore the rights of their foreign employees will face criminal punishment.”
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