

Amnesty International calls on Korea to improve rights for migrant farm workers



By Kim Hyo-jin



"I regularly worked from 6 a.m. to midnight with only an hour for lunch. The employer got angry anytime we took a break to stretch our body. So when I felt a sharp pain, I had to stand up when he wasn't looking and did it quickly ­ㅡ I didn't dare to linger," said one Cambodian migrant farm worker in a new Amnesty International report, released Monday, which calls for better rights for migrant workers in Korea.



"It was unfair because the Korean workers were allowed to rest but not us migrants," the report quotes the worker as saying.



The 89-page report, "Bitter Harvest," says Korea's farming industry is rife with abuse, and shows that migrants are compelled to work in conditions that they did not agree to, which it calls "forced labor."



Based on extensive interviews over a period of 14 months, the report covers a range of exploitative conditions that migrants face in the agricultural sector, which include excessive working hours, unpaid overtime, no weekly rest days, squalid accommodations, intimidation and violence.



A Cambodian migrant farm worker, CF, recalls his working experience at a vegetable farm in Gyeonggi Province as a dreadful memory.



"There was no toilet so we had to dig a hole in the ground to do our business. When that filled up, we dug another. My employer also paid me late once every two months or in installments."



Another migrant worker, GT, a 33-year-old Vietnamese woman, claims she and her colleague suffered physical violence.



"One day my Vietnamese colleague felt ill so she lay in bed and didn't come to work. My boss stormed into the room and hit her, pulled her hair, scratched her neck. It bled. Because I tried to stop him hitting my colleague, my boss swore at me and punched my shoulder three times," said GT.



"Disappointment is not enough to describe the feeling of migrant workers. A lot of them are devastated. They think they were deceived by the system," Norma Kang Muico, an Asia-Pacific Migrant Rights Researcher at Amnesty International told The Korea Times.



Muico said migrant farm workers here work more than 10 hours a day, 28 days a month, with 50 hours more than their contracted hours. "They are worked to death. It is an unbelievably excessive working time. Imagine you work for 380 hours a month. That's just unthinkable," said Muico.



There are about 20,000 migrant farm workers in Korea under the Employment Permit System (EPS). This government-run scheme was designed to provide migrant workers to small- and medium-sized companies that suffer a lack of labor.



Agricultural workers, however, are excluded from key legal protections relating to working hours, weekly paid rest days and daily breaks afforded to most of the country's workforce due to an exemption article of the Labor Standard Act. It leaves migrant farm workers vulnerable to abuse.



"The EPS is all tilted toward the employer's side," said Muico. She pointed out that under the EPS, migrants must obtain a release form signed by their employer, while employers can terminate a migrant's contract without having to justify the decision. Rather than giving a release letter, their employer tends to threaten to report them to the immigration authorities as "runaways," which would make them subject to arrest and deportation.



NR, a 23-year-old Cambodian woman told Amnesty International that when she asked her employer to sign her release document so that she could change jobs, "he got very angry with me and slapped my head and pushed me." She said she did not file a complaint because she did not know who to turn to.



Things, however, do not change even if they get to a caseworker to report employer's violence. The report introduced the case of a 25-year-old Cambodian man who was beaten by his employer because he cut cabbages incorrectly. When he went to the job center to complain, the caseworker advised him to "apologize" to the manager and make peace with him.



"Filing a complaint is never encouraged," said Muico. "The violation and abuse is happening because of the employer, but the one who is ultimately responsible is the government," said she, criticizing the Korean government for not monitoring whether the system worked fairly and not addressing the problem.



She recommended that the government stop turning a blind eye to exploitative work practices and to start training employers who are ignorant of how to treat migrant workers.



"No one wants to eat kimchi made in China. Koreans want made-in-Korea food. Migrant workers are willing to work here. Protecting migrant workers should be implemented not just in law, but in practice." said the researcher. "This would be a win-win mechanism."