Hundreds of migrant workers gathered in front of Seoul Station on Sunday. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, Apr. 30 (Korea Bizwire) – Hundreds of migrant workers gathered in front of Seoul Station on Sunday, the last weekend before Labor Day, demanding greater freedom to change workplaces and calling for an end to widespread wage theft and substandard living conditions that have come to define their lives in South Korea.
The rally, organized annually on the Sunday preceding May 1 because most migrant workers cannot take the day off, drew about 350 people this year, according to organizers from the Migrants’ Trade Union, the Joint Committee for Migrants in Korea, and migrant worker advocacy groups.
Recounting commonplace cases of unpaid wages, the groups said that nearly twice as many migrant workers experienced wage theft compared to native Koreans last year, leaving them owed a total of 121.5 billion won in back pay.
“Our wages are a matter of survival,” said one organizer. “We came to Korea to earn money, and we will fight to eliminate this widespread wage theft.”
Protesters also demanded decent housing, pointing to cases of workers forced to live in makeshift sheds plagued by mice, mosquitoes and insects. Many migrant workers, they said, are still consigned to living in vinyl greenhouses or shipping containers.
“We will keep demanding dormitories where we can live with human dignity,” an organizer said.
Discrimination in hiring and on the job remains pervasive, the protesters said, with examples of translators being paid less than their Korean counterparts and pregnant foreign instructors being fired.
“The Korean economy cannot function without the 1.3 million migrant workers here,” said Udaya Rai, president of the Migrants’ Trade Union. “But the laws governing migrant employment are extremely discriminatory.”
A key focus was reforming South Korea’s Employment Permit System, which restricts migrant workers’ ability to change workplaces, a practice that protesters said amounted to forced labor now banned under an International Labor Organization convention ratified by South Korea.
The system’s workplace transfer limits are “getting worse every year,” Rai said, with new regional movement curbs added in 2022.
“We demand that discriminatory policies like the Employment Permit System be abolished and replaced with an open labor permit that guarantees our rights,” he said.
After the rally, protesters marched from Seoul Station to the offices of the Seoul Regional Employment and Labor Administration, chanting: “Allow us to freely change workplaces!” and “We are not machines!”
Yang Kyung-soo, president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, said the protests highlighted that “migrant workers still do not fully enjoy labor rights and human rights protections.” He urged South Koreans to join their cause on Labor Day “to guarantee their labor and survival rights.”
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
