POCHEON, South Korea (AP) – “It’s a world of illegality,” Reverend Kim Dal-sung murmured over the phone as he drove his small KIA through narrow dirt roads zigzagging through sliced greenhouses and plastic tubes.
In the bleak landscape of opaque blue and gray in Pocheon, a city near South Korea’s state-of-the-art capital, hundreds of migrant workers from across Asia work in harsh conditions, unprotected by labor laws, while doing the hardest agricultural work. and less paid than most Koreans. avoid.
The death of a 31-year-old Cambodian worker on one of the farms in December has rekindled decades of criticism of South Korean exploitation of some of Asia’s poorest and 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 the conditions of migrant agricultural workers, including expanding access to health care. Discouraged by opposition from farmers, officials chose not to ban the use of shipping containers as a refuge.
On a cold February afternoon, groups of workers appeared and disappeared wearing conical bandanas and hats among hundreds of translucent tunnel-shaped greenhouses, each about 100 meters long, harvesting spinach, lettuce and other orchards. winter and stacking them in boxes.
Kim, a pastor and outspoken advocate for migrant workers’ rights, is an unwanted visitor to Pocheon’s farms, especially after Cambodian woman Nuon Sokkheng was found dead on December 20 inside a badly heated and outrageous shelter. on one of the farms.
Their deaths, and those of many others, highlight the often cruel conditions faced by migrant workers who have few resources against their bosses.
“Estate owners here are like absolute monarchs who rule migrant workers,” Kim said. “Some say they want to kill me.”
There are about 20,000 Asian migrant workers legally working on farms in South Korea, mainly in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal. They were introduced under their system of employment permits. To avoid undocumented immigrants, it makes it extremely difficult for workers to leave their employers, even when they are overworked or abused.
A Korean peasant watched him, frowning with his hands on his hips, then got on a tractor and began following the visiting journalists to prevent his foreign employees from talking to them.
Another shouted and waved his hand furiously as he approached, stopping an interview with two Cambodian workers who returned to a shipping container.
South Korean farmers are also suffering. The industry is in decline, hampered by decades of labor shortages and increased foreign competition. Significant labor arrives to work long hours for a low salary.
“Who are you to come here?” the woman who owned the farm smoked. “Do you even know what agriculture really is like?”
Activists and workers say migrant workers in Pocheon work 10 to 15 hours a day, with only two Saturdays off a month. They earn about $ 1,300 and $ 1,600 a month, well below the legal minimum wage their contracts are supposed to guarantee.
Rising before sunrise, they bend or bend for hours as they work through the huge plastic tunnels on each farm, planting, weeding, harvesting and thinning crops.
Workers are often crowded with shipping containers or weak, poorly ventilated huts, such as the one in which Sokkheng died.
Activists who interviewed his co-workers say he came to Pocheon in 2016 and died a few weeks before returning to Cambodia to spend time with his family. Sokkheng did not appear to have obvious health problems, but an autopsy showed he died from complications of cirrhosis, probably made worse by the harsh conditions in which he lived and worked, according to activists.
He died during a severe cold when temperatures dropped to less than 18 ° C. The shelter’s heating system was faulty and others living there went to stay with friends to escape the cold. Sokkheng refused to go, activists were told.
A Nepali agricultural worker, who asked not to use his name because he feared reprisals from his employer, said he was planning to flee to find work in the factory as an undocumented immigrant after five years working for a farmer which, according to him, was abusive and occasionally violent.
“At least I’ll have more days off,” said the worker, who spent an afternoon at a coffee shop outside the farm doing an interview.
“It’s just an extreme job (every day). He gets no breaks in the bathroom. You don’t even have time to drink water, ”said the Nepalese man. He complained of terrible pains in his back and shoulders, comparing the situation to slavery.
Only 10% of the 200,000 migrant workers they brought to South Korea under their system of employment permits (EPS) work on farms. About eight out of ten EPS workers work in factories, while the rest work in construction, fishing and service industries.
The Ministry of Labor told a lawmaker in October that 90-114 EPS workers died each year from 2017 to 2019.
Ven. Linsaro, a Cambodian Buddhist monk based in South Korea, helps with funerals and sends cremated remains to distressed families in Cambodia. He said he knew at least 19 Cambodian workers who died in 2020. By 2021, one agricultural worker and one worker have been found dead in their shelters.
“Most are between 20 and 30 years old. . . Many of them had just died sleeping, ”said Linsaro. He wonders whether serious illnesses will not be detected due to the lack of medical access of the workers.
The employment permit system was launched in 2004 to replace an industrial practices system of the 1990s famous for exposing migrant workers to horrific working conditions. It was intended to allow migrant workers the same basic legal rights as Koreans. But critics say the current system is even more exploitative and traps workers in a form of servitude.
Migrant agricultural workers are more vulnerable than factory workers, as the rules on working hours, rest and rest do not apply to agriculture. The country’s Labor Standards Act does not apply at all to jobs 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 dismissals or wage theft, with no compensation for work-related injuries and have little access to health care. They often have to pay between $ 90 and $ 270 a month to stay in miserable makeshift bedrooms that are often just shipping containers equipped with propane tanks for cooking. These temporary structures usually have only portable toilets.
“The government should stop letting farms with less than five workers use EPS,” Choi said.
Three Cambodian workers who were interviewed on a Pocheon farm but did not want to be named complained about the grueling work, the very cold winter in South Korea and the harassment by their employer, who calls them “dogs”.
They said they persevere because wages are better than in Cambodia, which gives them a chance to escape poverty.
“I will deal with the difficulties that throw me here,” said one, who helps pay for the education of his three brothers. He dreams of buying a farm and a cow when he gets home.
Farmers insist that they too are barely achieved.
“Our farming communities are badly aged,” said Shin Hyun-yoo, leader of an association of farmers in Gyeonggi Province, where Pocheon is located. “Many will fall if it becomes more difficult to hire foreign workers.”
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AP writer Sopheng Cheang contributed from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.