POCHEON, South Korea (AP) – ‘This is a world of lawlessness’, mumbles Rev. Kim Dal-sung over the phone as he drives his small KIA over narrow dirt roads zigzagging through greenhouses of plastic sheets and tubes.
In the gloomy landscape of pale blue and gray in Pocheon, a city near the ultra-modern capital of South Korea, hundreds of migrant workers from all over Asia toil in difficult conditions, unprotected by labor laws, while doing the hardest, low-paid farm work that most Korean work. prevent.
The death of a 31-year-old Cambodian female worker on one of the farms in December has revived criticism of South Korea’s exploitation of some of Asia’s poorest, most vulnerable people. Officials have promised reforms, but it is unclear what will change.
More than two months after Sokkheng’s death, South Korea this week announced plans to improve conditions for migrant workers, including access to health care. Since the farmers opposed them, officials chose not to ban the shipping containers as shelter.
On a cold February afternoon, groups of workers wearing bandanas and cone hats appear among hundreds of translucent tunnel-shaped greenhouses – each about 100 feet long – that harvest spinach, lettuce and other winter vegetables and pile high in boxes.
Kim, a minister and outspoken advocate for migrant workers’ rights, is an unwelcome visitor to the farms in Pocheon, especially after Cambodian woman Nuon Sokkheng was found dead in a poorly heated, bad shelter at one of the 20 the farms.
Her death, and that of many others, underscores the often cruel conditions faced by migrant workers who have little recourse to their bosses.
“Farm owners here are like absolute princes who rule over migrant workers,” Kim said. “Some say they want to kill me.”
There are about 20,000 Asian migrant workers legally working on South Korean farms, mostly from Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal. They were introduced under the work permit system. Keeping undocumented immigrants out makes it extremely difficult for workers to leave their employers, even if they are severely overworked or abused.
One Korean farmer looked at his hips with his hands, then climbed on a tractor and began dragging visiting reporters to prevent his foreign workers from talking to them.
Another shouted and waved her hand furiously as she approached, stopping an interview with two Cambodian workers who were back in a shipping container.
South Korean farmers are also suffering. The industry is declining, plagued by decades of labor shortages and increasing foreign competition. They get by importing labor to work long hours at low pay.
“Who are you to come here?” repented the woman farm owner. “Do you still know what farming really is?”
Activists and workers say migrant workers in Pocheon work 10-15 hours a day, with only two Saturdays off monthly. They earn about $ 1,300-1,600 a month, well below the legal minimum wage their contracts are supposed to insure.
They stand before sunrise and bend for hours as they work their way through the large plastic tunnels on each farm, where they plant, hoe, pluck and thin crops.
The workers are often crammed into ship containers or thin, poorly ventilated huts, such as those where Sokkheng died.
Activists who interviewed her colleagues say she came to Pocheon in 2016 and died a few weeks before returning to Cambodia to spend time with her family. Sokkheng apparently had no obvious health problems, but an autopsy showed she died of complications due to cirrhosis, probably exacerbated by the difficult conditions in which she lived and worked, activists say.
She died during a rapid cold, when the temperature dropped to minus 18 C. The shelter’s heating system was faulty, and others who lived there went to stay with friends to escape the cold. Sokkheng refused to go, they told activists.
A Nepalese farm worker, who has asked that his name not be used because he is afraid of retaliation from his employer, says he is considering running away to find factory work as an undocumented migrant after five years working for a farmer which according to him is insulting and sometimes violent.
“I will at least get even more days off,” said the worker who slipped to a coffee shop outside the farm for an interview one night.
‘It’s just an extreme amount of work (every day). You do not get bathroom breaks. You do not even have time to drink water, “said the Nepalese man. He complained that he was hungry for back and shoulder pain and compared the situation to slavery.
Only 10% of the 200,000 migrant workers brought to South Korea under its work permit system (EPS) work on farms. About eight out of ten EPS employees work in factories, while the others work in the construction, fishing and service industries.
The Ministry of Labor told a legislature in October that 90-114 EPS employees died each year from 2017 to 2019.
Ven. Linsaro, a Cambodian Buddhist monk based in South Korea, helps with funerals and sending surprising remains to bereaved families in Cambodia. He said he knows of at least 19 Cambodian workers who died in 2020. So far, in 2021, one farm worker and one worker were found in their shelters.
‘Most of them are twenty and thirty. . . “Many of them just died in their sleep,” Linsaro said. He wonders if serious illnesses can not be detected due to workers’ lack of medical access.
The work permit system was launched in 2004 to replace an industrial apprenticeship system from the 1990s that is notorious for exposing migrant workers to appalling working conditions. It was intended to give migrant workers the same legal rights as Koreans. But critics say the current system is even more exploitative and traps workers in some form of servitude.
Migrant farm workers are more vulnerable than factory workers, as rules on working hours, interruptions and leisure time do not apply to agriculture. The country’s labor standards law does not apply at all to workplaces with four or fewer employees, which is typical of many farms.
Choi Jung Kyu, a human rights lawyer, says workers on these farms are virtually unprotected from unfair layoffs or wage theft, and are compensated for workplace injuries and barely have access to health care. They often have to pay $ 90- $ 270 a month to stay in miserable dormitories that are often just containers equipped with propane tanks for cooking. Such temporary structures usually have only portable toilets.
“The government must absolutely stop allowing farms with less than five workers to use the EPS,” Choi said.
Three Cambodian workers who were interviewed on a Pocheon farm but did not want to give their names complained about the grueling work, South Korea’s bitterly cold winter and harassment by their employer, whom they call ‘dogs’.
They said they persevered because wages were better than in Cambodia, giving them a chance to escape poverty.
“I will deal with the hardships that are being inflicted on me here,” said one who helps educate his three siblings. He dreams of buying a farm and a cow when he returns home.
Farmers maintain that they also barely get by.
“Our farming communities are badly outdated,” said Shin Hyun-yoo, leader of a farmers’ association in Gyeonggi Province, where Pocheon is located. “Many will collapse if it becomes more difficult to hire foreign workers.”
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AP author Sopheng Cheang made a contribution from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.