This file photo taken April 11, 2021, shows fishing boats in the East Sea. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, July 17 (Korea Bizwire) — Foreign workers accounted for nearly 50 percent of crew members working in South Korea last year, the oceans ministry said Monday.
A total of 60,148 crew members were working on local fishing boats as of end-2022, and 28,281 of them were foreigners, or 47 percent of the total, according to the data by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries.
It marked a 3.5 percent growth on-year, it added.
The country has seen a steady increase in the number of foreign crew members, with their proportion rising from 43.1 percent in 2018 to 43.6 percent in 2019 and 44.4 percent in 2020.
“South Korea has experienced a manpower shortage in the field. The government will redouble efforts to improve working conditions for crew members and to ease labor shortage problems,” Oceans Minister Cho Seung-hwan said.
Last year, the government decided to raise the minimum wage of foreign crew members here to the level received by their Korean colleagues by 2026, as foreign crew members here received some 80 percent of what Korean crewmen took home.
It also began granting a one-year extension of stay permits for foreign fishing crewmen here in a bid to address a labor shortage in the industry.
(Yonhap)
