POCHEON, South Korea (PA) – “It’s a world of iniquity,” muttered Rev. Kim Dal-sung on the phone as she drove her little KIA on narrow dirt paths zigzagging through greenhouses made of sheets and plastic tubes.
In the gloomy blue and gray landscape of Pocheon, a city near South Korea’s state-of-the-art capital, hundreds of migrant workers from all over Asia are struggling in harsh conditions, unprotected by labor law, while doing the hardest, less paid agricultural work from 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 Korea’s 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 announced this week plans to improve conditions for migrant agricultural workers, including expanding access to health care. Frightened by the opposition of the farmers, the officials chose not to ban the use of shipping containers as a shelter.
On a cold February afternoon, groups of workers wearing bandanas and conical hats appeared and disappeared among hundreds of tunnel-shaped translucent greenhouses – each about 100 meters long – harvesting spinach, lettuce and other greens. winter and stacking them in boxes.
Kim, a pastor and open supporter of migrant workers’ rights, is an unwanted visitor to farms in Pocheon, especially after Cambodian woman Nuon Sokkheng was found dead on December 20 in a poorly heated and poor shelter on one of the farms.
Her death, as well as that of many others, highlights the often cruel conditions faced by migrant workers with few remedies against their bosses.
“Farm owners here are like absolute monarchs who govern migrant workers,” Kim said. “Some say they want to kill me.”
There are about 20,000 Asian migrant workers working legally on South Korean farms, mostly in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal. They were brought into its employment authorization system. To stay away from undocumented immigrants, it is extremely difficult for workers to leave their employers, even when they are overworked or abused.
A Korean farmer watched, frowning on his hips, then climbed onto a tractor and began watching reporters visit to prevent his foreign employees from talking to them.
Another person shouted and waved his hand angrily as he approached, stopping an interview with two Cambodian workers who had returned to a shipping container.
And South Korean farmers are suffering. The industry is in decline, affected by decades of labor shortages and growing foreign competition. It imports labor to work long hours for low wages.
“Who are you to come here?” the wife of the farm owner smoked. “Do you really know what agriculture really is like?”
Activists and workers say migrant workers in Pocheon work 10-15 hours a day, with only two Saturdays off a month. He earns about $ 1,300-1,600 a month, well below the legal minimum wage that contracts should provide.
Rising before sunrise, they squat or bend for hours as they make their way through the huge plastic tunnels on each farm, planting, weeding, harvesting and thinning crops.
Workers are often crammed into shipping containers or weak, poorly ventilated huts, such as the one in which Sokkheng died.
Activists who interviewed her co-workers say she came to Pocheon in 2016 and died just weeks before she returned to Cambodia to spend time with her family. Sokkheng did not appear to have obvious health problems, but an autopsy showed he died of complications from cirrhosis, probably aggravated by the harsh conditions in which he lived and worked, activists say.
She died during a severe cold, when temperatures 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 leave, activists were told.
A Nepalese farm worker, who demanded that his name not be used because he fears retaliation from his employer, said he plans to flee to find factory work as an undocumented migrant after five years of work for a farmer he said was abusive and occasional. violent.
“At least I’ll get more days off,” said the worker, who one evening entered a cafe outside the farm for an interview.
“It’s just an extreme amount of work (every day). You have no breaks in the bathroom. You don’t even have time to drink water, “said the Nepalese. He complained of excruciating back and shoulder pain, resembling slavery.
Only 10% of the 200,000 migrant workers brought to South Korea under its employment permit or EPS system work on farms. About eight out of 10 EPS workers work in factories, while the others work in construction, fishing and jobs in the service industry.
The Ministry of Labor told a parliamentarian in October that 90-114 EPS workers died every year from 2017 to 2019.
Ven. Linsaro, a Cambodian Buddhist monk based in South Korea, helps with funerals and sends cremated remains to grieving families in Cambodia. He said he knows of at least 19 Cambodian workers who died in 2020. So far in 2021, one agricultural worker and one worker have been found dead in their shelters.
“Most are in their 20s and 30s. . . Many of them just died in their sleep, “said Linsaro. He wonders if serious illnesses are undetected due to the lack of medical access for workers.
The employment permit system was launched in 2004 to replace a system of industrial trainees in the 1990s, famous for exposing migrant workers to horrific working conditions. It was intended to give migrant workers the same basic legal rights as Koreans. But critics say the current system is even more exploitative and catches workers in a form of servitude.
Migrant agricultural workers are more vulnerable than factory workers because the rules on working hours, breaks and free time do not apply to agriculture. The law on labor standards in the country does not apply at all to jobs with four or fewer employees, which is typical for many farms.
Choi Jung Kyu, a human rights lawyer, says workers on these farms are virtually unprotected from unfair dismissals or pay theft, are not compensated for injuries at work, and have limited access to health care. You often have to pay $ 90- $ 270 a month to stay in makeshift fireplaces, which are often just transport containers equipped with propane cooking tanks. Such temporary structures usually have only portable toilets.
“The government should no longer allow farms with less than five workers to use EPS,” Choi said.
Three Cambodian workers who were interviewed at a Pocheon farm but did not want to be named complained about the grueling work, the extremely 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, giving them a chance to escape poverty.
“I will take care of any weight thrown at 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 returns home.
Farmers insist that they too can barely make it.
“Our farming communities are very old,” said Shin Hyun-yoo, leader of a farmers’ association in Gyeonggi Province, where Pocheon is located. “Many will collapse if foreign workers find it harder to hire.”
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AP writer Sopheng Cheang contributed from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.