POCHEON, South Korea (AP) – “It’s a world of lawlessness,” Reverend Kim Dal-sung muttered on the phone as he zigzagged through plastic sheeting and pipe greenhouses with his little KIA.
In the bleak landscape of dull blues and grays in Pocheon, a town near South Korea’s ultra-modern capital, hundreds of migrant workers from across Asia toil under harsh conditions, unprotected by labor laws, doing the toughest, lowest-paid farm work most Koreans avoid.
The death of a 31-year-old Cambodian worker on one of the farms in December has revived decades of criticism of South Korean exploitation of some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Asia. 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 farm workers, including greater access to healthcare. Discouraged by opposition from farmers, officials chose not to ban the use of shipping containers as a shelter.
On a chilly February afternoon, groups of workers wearing bandanas and cone-shaped hats appeared and disappeared between hundreds of translucent tunnel-shaped greenhouses – each about 100 meters long – to harvest spinach, lettuce and other wintergreen and stack them high in boxes.
Kim, a pastor and outspoken advocate for the rights of migrant workers, is an unwelcome visitor to the farms in Pocheon, especially after Cambodian woman, Nuon Sokkheng, was found dead on December 20 in a poorly heated, filthy shelter near one of the farms.
Her death, and that of many others, underscore the often cruel conditions faced by migrant workers who have few options for redress against their bosses.
“Farms here are like absolute monarchs ruling 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, mainly from Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Nepal. They were brought in under the work permit system. Keeping undocumented immigrants out makes it extremely difficult for employees to leave their employer, even if they are severely overworked or abused.
A Korean farmer frowned at his hips, then got on a tractor and started following visiting reporters to keep his foreign workers from talking to them.
Another screamed and waved her hand furiously as she approached and stopped interviewing two Cambodian workers who were going back into a shipping container.
South Korean farmers are also suffering. The industry is in decline, haunted by decades of labor market tightness and increasing foreign competition. By importing labor they get to work long hours at low wages.
“Who are you to come here?” hit the woman’s peasant woman. “Do you know what farming really is?”
Activists and workers say migrant workers in Pocheon work 10-15 hours a day, with only two Saturdays off a month. They earn about $ 1,300-1,600 a month, well below the legal minimum wage their contracts are supposed to guarantee.
They get up before sunrise and squat or bend for hours as they make their way through the huge plastic tunnels on each farm, planting, weeding, picking and thinning crops.
The workers are often crammed into shipping containers or in thin, poorly ventilated huts, such as the one where Sokkheng died.
Activists who interviewed her colleagues say she came to Pocheon in 2016 and died just weeks before returning to Cambodia to spend time with her family. Sokkheng did not appear to have any apparent health problems, but an autopsy showed that she died of complications from cirrhosis, likely exacerbated by the harsh conditions in which she lived and worked, the activists say.
She died in a bitter cold snap when the temperature dropped to minus 18 C. The shelter’s heating system was broken, and others who lived there stayed with friends to escape the cold. Sokkheng refused to go, they told activists.
A Nepalese farm worker, who asked not to use his name because he feared reprisals from his employer, said he was considering running away to find factory work as an undocumented migrant after five years working for a farmer he says is offensive and off. And then was. violent.
“At least I get more days off,” said the worker, who slipped to a coffee shop outside the farm one evening for an interview.
“It’s just an extreme amount of work (every day). You don’t get bathroom breaks. You don’t even have time to drink water, ”said the Nepalese. He complained of excruciating back and shoulder pain, comparing the situation to slavery.
Only 10% of the 200,000 migrant workers brought to South Korea under the Employment Permit System, or EPS, work on farms. About eight in ten EPS workers toil in factories, while the rest work in construction, fishing and services.
The Department of Labor told a lawmaker in October that 90-114 EPS workers died every year between 2017 and 2019.
Ven. Linsaro, a Cambodian Buddhist monk from South Korea, assists with funerals and sending cremated remains to grieving families in Cambodia. He said he knew of at least 19 Cambodian workers who died in 2020. So far in 2021, an agricultural worker and a laborer have been found dead in their shelters.
“Most of them are in their twenties and thirties. Many of them have just died in their sleep, ”said Linsaro. He wonders whether serious illnesses go unnoticed due to workers’ lack of medical access.
The permit to work system was launched in 2004 to replace a 1990s industrial trainee system notorious 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, trapping workers in some form of servitude.
Migrant farm workers are more vulnerable than factory workers, as rules on working hours, breaks and time off do not apply to agriculture. The country’s Labor Standards Act 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 unjust layoffs or wage theft, are not compensated for workplace injuries, and have little access to health care. They often have to pay $ 90- $ 270 a month to stay in wretched makeshift dorms, which are often just shipping containers equipped with propane tanks for cooking. Such temporary structures usually only have portable toilets.
“The government must absolutely stop using EPS on farms with fewer than five employees,” Choi said.
Three Cambodian workers who were interviewed on a farm in Pocheon but refused to be named, complained about the grueling work, the bitterly cold winter in South Korea and the harassment by their employer, who calls them “dogs.”
They said they persist because wages are better than in Cambodia, giving them the opportunity to escape poverty.
“I will face all the difficulties that are being done to me here,” said one of them, who is helping to raise his three siblings. He dreams of buying a farm and a cow when he returns home.
Farmers insist they barely make ends meet.
“Our farming communities are very old,” said Shin Hyun-yoo, a farmer’s association leader in Gyeonggi Province, where Pocheon is located. “Many will collapse when it becomes more difficult to hire foreign workers.”
AP writer Sopheng Cheang contributed from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.