Invisible Market Hand
It has been 30 years since Korea began hiring foreign workers in earnest with the introduction of the Industrial Trainee System in 1993, which was replaced by the employment permit system in 2004. But chaos is still lingering in the field.
According to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on July 3, foreign workers who enter the country on a non-professional work (E9) visa with restrictions on changing workplaces are increasingly putting the porous system to bad use.
They use all sorts of tricks to leave for other workplaces that suit their tastes. Under the Employment Permit System, E9 foreign workers who are mainly employed at small and medium-sized manufacturing companies are supposed to work for three years but it is rare for them to work at their workplaces until the end of this period.
According to the Ministry of Justice’s and Statistics Korea’s Immigrant Status and Employment Survey (2020), 42.8 percent of foreign workers changed workplaces within one year of entering Korea. The percentage of foreign workers who did not complete six months of work rose from 17.8 percent in 2017 to 22.5 percent in 2020. Illegal brokers are also on the rise, collecting commissions for arranging new jobs and encouraging it.
“Korean SMEs are helpless against foreign workers’ absurd demands to leave for other workplaces,” said Lee Kyu-yong, a researcher at the Korea Labor Institute.
One of the most acute conflicts between foreign workers and Korean employers is the issue of foreign workers’ demand to change their workplaces and leave for other companies. It is essentially a tug of war between foreign workers who want to change their workplaces and Korean employers that cannot accept their demands. In principle, foreign workers who enter Korea on an E9 visa should continue to work for their Korean companies with which they initially signed job contracts. They are limited to applying for a change of workplace three times within three years from the dates of their entry into Korea. And they should only do so if their employers do something wrong like not paying wages or engaging in unfair treatment.
However, there are a slew of cases where foreign workers obstinately demand to change their jobs in order to move to more comfortable workplaces with better pay and benefits. They exchange information through social media and follow brokers’ encouragement before moving to other companies. Experts point out that, increasingly, more and more foreign workers do not actually care about the Employment Permit System that was introduced in 2004 to replace the Industrial Trainee System and has been in operation for 20 years.
The reason why foreign workers cannot be blocked from changing workplaces is that the current Employment Permit System has no mechanism to manage foreign workers after they enter Korea. Korean employers say that they have no one to help them when they are troubled with foreign workers who try to terminate their contracts.
Another problem is that there are no regulations to punish foreign workers who make trouble such as engaging in frequent slowdowns or go absent without notice. As a result, the number of illegal immigrants continues to grow. Until they are caught by government authorities and forced to leave Korea, foreign workers can work wherever they want after the end of their three-year period of stay set by the Employment Permit System. When they are forced to leave Korea, they even get severance pay from their companies that they left without permission. “It burns me up that I am forced to pay even severance to illegal immigrants,” said the head of a Korean company.
As of April this year, 278,363 foreign workers hold E9 visas in Korea. The E9 visa quota is expected to increase due to demand from the Korean manufacturing industry, which is short of labor, so it is urgent to overhaul the system. “Instead of the Work Permit System that allows foreign workers to freely choose jobs like Koreans, we need a complementary measure that befits the purposes of the Employment Permit System that limits foreign workers’ change of jobs for a certain period of time in consideration of Korean companies’ needs,” said Lee Tae-hee, a professor at Daegu Haany University and a former head of the Daegu Employment and Labor Office.
Korean SMEs insist that much stricter restrictions be placed on foreign workers changing workplaces. “Considering the realities of companies that are in dire need of skilled workers, let alone those for simple work, it is urgent to tighten standards so that migrant workers will not be allowed to leave their original workplaces for at least one to two years after entering Korea,” said Lee Myung-ro, head of the Human Resources Policy Division at the Korea Federation of SMEs.
Voices are also being raised for the forced departure of those who violate their labor contracts and begin to unreasonably change their jobs. According to a recent survey of 500 SMEs conducted by the Federation of Korean Chambers of Commerce and Industry, 38.2 percent of the respondents said that foreign workers should be forced to leave Korea when they engage in unfair behavior such as slowdowns while demanding to leave for other companies, even if their employers are not at fault. In addition, 26.8 percent said that such foreign workers should lose some points in their evaluations when they try to reenter Korea as foreign workers again.