Timothy C. Lim: Rallying for migrant workers

Korea Herald: Feb. 2006

For more than a decade, foreign workers in South Korea have been struggling

to carve out a decent life. It has been a long struggle, but not a completely

empty one. Indeed, since the early 1990s - when "unskilled" foreign workers

first started to come to Korea in large numbers - some meaningful change has

occurred. Legally, at least, foreign workers in Korea have achieved several

important rights, including, with some exceptions, the same basic labor rights

as native Korean workers. This applies equally to "illegal" and legal workers.

One of the most recent changes occurred in August 2004 with the

implementation of a "guest worker" program known as the Employment

Permit System.

On the surface, the EPS was supposed to rectify the most egregious abuses of

foreign workers; indeed, the EPS, for the first time, provided the framework

for "unskilled" foreign workers to become legal workers in Korea, with all the

rights and "privileges" that it implies. Prior to the establishment of the EPS,

unskilled foreign workers could only legally enter Korea as "trainees." The

industrial trainee system, however, was a convenient, but obvious lie: it was

not designed to provide training, but was, instead, meant to institutionalize and

legitimize the systematic exploitation of foreign labor in the small- and

medium-sized business sector. This is one reason the trainee system failed to

achieve its goal. The majority of foreign workers simply left their "trainee"

positions after arriving in Korea, preferring to work "illegally" primarily

because it allowed them to receive much higher wages. To the government,

however, the illegal status of foreign workers (who at one point constituted

upwards of 80 percent of all foreign labor in Korea) did not necessarily

represent an urgent problem. After all, without legal status, these workers, too,

could be more easily exploited and abused.
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