Subscribe
E-Paper
.jpg/dims/resize/740/optimize) |
| Migrant workers and their Korean sympathizers call on the government not to crack down on undocumented laborers during a protest rally in front of Seoul City Hall last month. / The Korea Times photo |
By Choi Sung-jin
.jpg/dims/resize/120/optimize) |
| Sherpa Lha Dorje |
.jpg/dims/resize/120/optimize) |
| Rai Udaya |
.jpg/dims/resize/120/optimize) |
| Madhusdan Ojha |
Dorje, 24, receives about 1 million won ($870) a month, way below than the 1.2 million won which is the monthly equivalent of the legal minimum wage here.
Still his biggest problem is not the salary.
"There is no fixed time," he said. "My boss forces me and two other Nepalese workers to do work regardless of the time, until 9 p.m., 11 p.m. or even midnight sometimes, with no extra pay." Protests or complaints bring forth the same reply, "Go back to your country if you don't like it."
Dorje said he sends 800,000 won a month to his family, whose home was ravaged by an earthquake last April, and who now lives in a cottage. He holds out with the remaining 200,000 won.
"Yet what I cannot stand is not the salary," he said. "What makes life really difficult for me and my colleagues are demands made on us to work at all hours and ‘bad behavior' of the boss."
Dorje said the president of his company always pays salaries a month late for God knows why, he is always angry, and has never said "thank you" to his foreign employees.
Asked what he wants most now, the young college graduate said, "Let me go (to other workplaces)."
However, this is a wish that's hard to make a reality. The rules of the employment permit system call for allowing migrant workers to change their workplaces up to three times in three years, but few Korean employers abide by that rule by writing a letter of consent, as they hate workers moving to other companies as soon as they acquire relevant skills.
Nor do they want to keep other provisions in the system, such as those that oblige them to treat foreign workers fairly.
"These employers think alien workers should not complain as long as they can earn several times more money than in their countries," said Rai Udaya, president of the Migrants Trade Union. "The migrant laborers are doing work that Koreans would rather not do, especially at the wage levels foreigners get. Contrary to some Koreans' complaints that foreigners take away their jobs, few would choose to work in these dirty, difficult and dangerous jobs if foreigners leave. Why discriminate against immigrant workers that fill a void in the workforce?"
Going back to their homelands cannot be an option given the considerable time and money these guest workers spent on coming to Korea. Each guest worker spends at least a couple of million won on visas, brokerage fees and airfare. The whole process may take a year but applicants spend another year preparing for it, learning the Korean language and receiving job training. They often have to stop all other work or activities to focus on preparations. The "opportunity cost" is too high for them to pack up and leave, as economists put it.
The situation facing Madhusdan Ojah was little better if not worse.
Last October, Ojah injured his back while lifting heavy materials at a metal-processing company on the outskirts of Incheon. Since then, he has not been assigned normal work ― and consequently not been paid normal wages. When he reported to work each morning, his boss asked whether or not his back bothered him. When Ojah said yes, the boss told him to go back to his lodge. "I could do 95 percent of the work but was afraid the boss would make me lift heavy things again if I had told him I was completely healed to return to normal work and be paid full wages," he said.
The company had a forklift to carry heavy materials and equipment but the manager made immigrant workers do most of the lifting, saying that was faster and more efficient.
Since he injured his back, Ojah has received little pay and even had to pay for his lodging and part of his medical fees because he could not work even if he desperately wanted to. The 34-year-old Nepalese with a wife and two children in his country has slips of paper written by his boss to specify these costs, which will later be deducted from his severance pay.
Korean employers do not usually pay a retirement allowance until one year passes after migrant workers return to their country. These employers say if they give severance pay within two weeks as they do for Koreans, migrant laborers do not leave Korea and continue to work elsewhere as illegal aliens. From the standpoint of foreign workers, however, that is a lame excuse for overdue payments.
"As we see it, however, what turns a number of immigrant workers into illegal aliens and undocumented laborers are the inhumane system and employers who make the most of it," said Udaya, the union leader.
At the center of all these abuses of basic rights and rampant discrimination is the "employment permit system," which some civic activists say is little different from "modern-day slave labor," by allowing long work hours in poor conditions and disallowing in principle the right of foreign workers to freely change their place of employment.
The system went into effect in 2004 to improve the previous "industrial trainee system," a different name for labor exploitation as it introduced foreign workers under the pretext of teaching them skills but forced them to do simple labor at very low ― almost no ― wages. Although the current system guarantees labor rights and equal treatment in principle, these provisions are not being observed in reality because the system restricts free changes of workplaces. Employers can silence protesting workers by disallowing them to move to other workplaces and threatening to expel them.
This explains why the migrant workers' union, which began its work a decade ago but was legalized only last year, has persistently called for replacing the employment permit system with a "work permit system."
The two systems do not seem to be vastly different from each other, in that they both call for basic labor rights and nondiscrimination. As their names indicate, however, the focus of each system is different: the employment permit system gives business owners the right to employ immigrant workers while the work permit system gives foreigners the right to work. Unlike the former, the latter stipulates the freedom to change workplaces and equal pay for work of equal value, which makes a world of difference between the two.
Some Koreans say the work permit system, if introduced, will make their country a paradise ― or a lawless world as they see it ― for foreigners, while pointing out the high youth unemployment rate.
But Udaya asks back, saying, "How many Koreans will endure 12- or 16-hour-long workdays without extra pay and job-related injuries with no medical insurance?"
There is an old Korean saying, "An old frog never thinks it was a tadpole."
In the 1960s-70s when Korea's per capita income was a fraction of what it is now, young Korean men and women worked as miners and nurses in Germany, sending hard cash to help revive the economies of their families and country, as described in the 2014 mega-hit film "Ode to My Father."
Unfortunately, these foreign workers' "Korean Dream" will likely remain a story of the distant future.
The responses from the employers of the two Nepalese workers to fact-checking calls were as cold as ice. An official responsible for migrant labor policy at the Ministry of Employment and Labor, when asked to answer to a set of questions by e-mail, repeatedly asked the purpose of the reporting but never answered our questions.
Ojah, the worker with a back injury, was finally allowed to leave his workplace last week ― but only after the union uncovered other problems with the company and threatened to hold a protest rally in front of it.
How many more such threats and protests should they make to bring the same "luck" to Dorje and tens of thousands of other struggling migrant workers?
