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| May 13, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | The Koreas Pressure on to protect foreign workers' rights By Ahn Mi-Young SEOUL - Dante Friscope has three month wages unpaid, but says that he would not dare to remind his Korean boss of the salary delay. ''I am fearful of annoying the boss, who might report my illegal status to the immigration office,'' says the 32-year-old ''trainee'' worker from the Philippines, who works from 9am to 9pm at a machinery factory in Yangsan in southern Kyongsang province. His monthly wage is 340,000 won ($309), but he actually receives only 152,000 won, because the remainder is deposited into his boss' bank account as ''guarantee money'' in case he escapes. So, his silence is not surprising. If spotted by immigration authorities, he would immediately be deported to his home country. Friscope is one of some 138,000 foreign workers in South Korea who stay beyond their contracted period of two or three years with the Korea Federation of Small Businesses (KFSB), a lobby group of local small to medium-sized companies. KFSB is authorized by the government to bring in foreign workers to leather, machine, metalworking and textile factories - whose jobs are considered ''difficult, dangerous and dirty'' or ''3-D'' and shunned by South Koreans in this newly industrialized economy. Because of the shortage of labor for such jobs, the government has worked out the ''trainee'' scheme to allow temporary work by foreigners in the country. But it has also allowed a way for workers, still in demand by their employers, to look for ways to stay on in South Korea and work - illegally. ''Illegal foreign workers'' like Friscope are in fact forced to overstay their contract, for they must earn more than the $2,000-3,000 contract that he had paid to the Korean broker in the Philippines to obtain the status of ''technical trainee'' from the KFSB federation. ''I still think that I am lucky. Because I've heard some of my friends who have one year of unpaid wages, only to get a slap in the face and beaten when they protested,'' says Friscope. Friscope is one of 85,000 foreign workers at 1,222 factories in South Korea who have reported that their wages are unpaid for one month to three years, according to a report by the Joint Committee of Migrant Workers in Korea, a nationwide network of 22 counseling and education facilities for foreign workers. Human rights activists who run these facilities are deploring the ''glaring cases of human rights abuses'' against foreign workers, and asking the government to stop keeping a blind eye to their unhumane treatment. ''The lawmakers must enact the act to protect foreign workers from inhumane treatment and to grant them the same labor rights as the local workers regardless of their illegal status,'' said Kim Hae-sung, 39, a pastor who runs one of the counseling and education centers for foreign workers in southern Sungnam city near Seoul. ''If we persecute other people only because they come from different nations, our pride in being a homeogenous people should be blamed as a shame to deprive us of the wisdom of sharing life with other peoples,'' journalist Kim Young-hee writes in editorial of the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper. Kim reminds Koreans that, only in the 1960s and 1970s, South Korean women used to work as nurses in Germany, and that now some 300,000 Koreans are working in Japan. ''How would you feel if Koreans in foreign nations were harshly treated like foreign workers now here?'' she asks. In the face of public pressure, President Kim Dae-jung is directing measures to ensure better protection of the human rights of foreign workers. ''It is deplorable and shameful for us to discriminate foreign workers, and we won't any longer tolerate it,'' he says. Migrant workers began to arrive in Korea in 1991, when the Industrial Technical Trainee Program was introduced to provide visas to foreigners employed by the overseas subsidiaries of Korean companies. The program was created to allow large companies to bring foreign staff to Korea so that they could receive ''training'' here. But it soon became a way for small- and medium-sized businesses to bring in cheap labor, and get around hostility to formally opening the labor market to foreigners. They lobbied the government to allow them access to foreign labor, mostly from China and Southeast Asian countries. In 1993, the KFSB was given the authority to operate a revised ''trainee'' program to bring in unskilled migrant workers in order to ease the shortage of manpower in the 3-D industries. According to the Ministry of Justice, there were 217,690 migrant workers as of January 2000. Of these, 138,049 were ''undocumented workers'' who were brought in as technical trainees, but later overstayed their contract periods. Many of these migrant workers have to pay recruitment fees demanded by Korean brokers operating in their countries, and these brokers reportedly use part of the recruitment fees to lobby the KFSB officials to get a larger allotment of foreign workers. Often, it is only after foreign workers arrive in South Korea and find a job that they learn it will be impossible to repay their debt within the contract period. As a result, some are urging the government to scrap the ''technical trainee'' system and instead transfer the authorities from KFSB to a joint jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor, Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They would take better care of the human rights and interests of foreign workers than the KFSB, they argue. ''We must appreciate foreign workers,'' says the president of a machine factory in Ansan. ''Without them, who else would be willing to come and work at such a low pay at our factory?,'' he asks. On the part of government, foreign workers may be a ''necessary evil'', said another factory manager, because their labor is needed by enterprises. (Inter Press Service) | |||||||||
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