Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:30:41 -0800 (PST)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: Migrant workers in Korea


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=69&ItemID=6767
Migrant Workers and the Politics of Resentment
South Korea creates two-tiered system for labor
migrants, activists end yearlong sit-in.
	 	
 	 	 	
......... 	by Jamie Doucette 	December 01, 2004	 	 	

The Equality Trade Union – Migrants’ Branch (ETU-MB),
a trade union of largely undocumented migrant workers
in South Korea, ended its 380 day long sit-in in front
of downtown Seoul’s Myeongdong Cathedral on Sunday.
Their sit-in had started on November 15, 2003 to
protest the government’s crackdown on undocumented
migrant workers. After a year of constant struggle,
and with winter settling in, the number of workers at
the sit-in site in downtown Seoul had slowly declined,
down to roughly thirty-five from the original one
hundred. Before Sunday, a number of workers had
decided to go underground in order to work and send
money back home to their families, and in the face of
escalating harassment from the government, the
ETU-MB’s leadership decided to call off the sit-in for
the time being in order to reconsider their strategy
for struggle in the coming year. 

The ETU-MB is a vocal, migrant-led union that has
organized large protests of undocumented migrant
workers in downtown Seoul and throughout the country
since 2001 in order to assert that migrant workers
must be seen and heard. In particular, the ETU-MB and
migrants’ groups such as the Joint Committee for
Migrants in Korea (JCMK) have been successful in
forcing the government to reform its labor migration
policies, especially the Industrial Trainee System
which they blamed for the conditions of exploitation
faced by many migrant workers. 

After years of both domestic and international
pressure, the South Korean government decided to scrap
its Industrial Trainee System in July of 2001.
However, the Employment Permit System (EPS) that has
replaced it has failed to offer work permits to
thousands of workers currently living in the country,
thus creating a two-tiered system for migrant workers
by assigning rights and benefits to one set of migrant
workers who had been in the country less than four
years, and keeping older undocumented workers
permanently alienated. 

Critics believe that the problems faced by
undocumented workers will only be solved when the
government offers a fair work permit to these
thousands of workers who were not included in the EPS.
The South Korean government has showed, however, that
it is more concerned with discouraging the permanent
settlement of undocumented migrant workers in South
Korea than it is with solving any of their work-
related problems. 

>From Trainees to Permitted Workers 

Under the old Trainee system, migrant workers were
considered ‘trainees’ rather than workers, even though
they were toiling twelve hours a day on average in 3-D
jobs – work that is dirty, difficult, and dangerous –
in the country’s small to mid-size industries. In 2001
negotiations began for an Employment Permit System
(EPS). The government gradually gave into a number of
the demands from migrant groups, including the
protection of migrants under the country’s Labor
Standards Act, as well as the extension of the minimum
wage, health insurance and employment insurance to
migrant workers. 

In its final form, however, the EPS did not take into
account recommendations by migrant’s groups to extend
the program from three to five years, in order to give
workers more time to save money and to pay back some
of the high debts they incur to come to Korea, where
the recruitment process involves a lucrative set of
fees from their employers, brokers, and other actors
involved in what seems to be a quasi-legal system at
best. Critics also complained that the EPS entrenches
an unfair labor policy as workers are forbidden from
freely changing workplaces and are dependant on yearly
sponsorship from their employers. Thus, they complain,
few migrant workers will exercise their rights for
fear they will be deported. 

After lawmakers passed the bill creating an Employment
Permit System for foreign workers in August of 2003,
the government began plans for a new immigration,
starting in November 2003 and continuing to date. One
year later, however, there are still 180,000
undocumented workers out of a total number of 420,000
migrant workers, numbers comparable to before the
crackdown began. 

The government’s crackdown, however, has been largely
unsuccessful because its goals have been largely
punitive, aiming more to punish those migrant workers
with the strongest ties to Korea than to regularize
the majority of workers in Korea. Even the OECD has
pointed out that migrant workers have become a stable
feature of the South Korean economy, with many
migrants establishing close ties to the communities in
which they live and work. Rather than taking steps to
prevent these communities from feeling permanently
alienated, however, the government seems set on doing
just the opposite. 

During the crackdown, the government assigned work
permits to migrant workers whom had been in the
country under four years and attempted to deport those
workers whom had been in the country for longer. Thus,
workers with the strongest ties to South Korea, whom
spoke the language and had started families in some
cases, were put in the most precarious situation.
Subsequently, many of these workers took to hiding in
their factories or in the hills during times of
crackdown, often taking dramatic actions, including
suicide, to avoid the immigration manhunt. 

Rather than significantly reducing the number of
undocumented migrant workers, the result of the
crackdown has been to create a two-tier system of work
for migrants. Migrants with work permits benefit from
better workplace conditions and stable pay than under
the old trainee system, but their rights are still
heavily circumscribed under the new system, and
without enough time to save and send money back home,
many critics argue that the number of workers
overstaying their permits will increase substantially
as their three years draw to a close. 

For undocumented migrant workers, the result has been
an increase in the number of what are termed stranded
workers, hiding out and working on an intermittent
basis without enough money to travel home. These
workers constitute a new class of day-laborers for
whom working conditions are ruthlessly more exploitive
than before the crackdown. For example, members of the
Myeongdong sit-in whom have gone in search for work
reported being offered as low as 50,000 won (US $45)
for three (12-hour) days work. Factory owners know
that these workers are desperate, at the mercy of
their bosses, immigration officials and the police. 

Tears of Han: Migrant workers and the politics of
resentment in South Korea 

In Korea, to word han is used to describe feelings of
unresolved anger, frustration, and resentment at
historical injustice. In Korean social history, han
denotes feelings of oppression by a suppressed people
(minjung) toiling under occupation or economic
hardship with a lack of personal freedom. Social
protest is often described as outpourings, or tears of
han (hanpuli), and draws attention to the social
conditions that create this resentment. Like the
trajectory of Korean social protest, the emotional
life of han is hard to follow. It resides just below
the surface in moments of apparent calm, then
following some rupture it bursts forth in moments of
profound social transformation. The Great Worker
Struggle following the June Uprising in 1987 is just
one example, where the three months following the
announcements of free elections by the military
dictatorship saw the number of labor disputes jump to
a total greater than the combined labor disputes since
1961. As wages increased throughout the early nineties
in Korean factories, the government began importing
foreign workers to increase the pool of low waged
labor for South Korean factories. Activists soon
realized that the han of migrant workers in South
Korea was from similar conditions that they had fought
so hard to decrease, which may explain why so many
Korean activists have offered their help. 

Over the past year, there has been tremendous
solidarity felt between Korean social movements and
migrant workers. For instance, even though over the
year the ETU-MB faced severe repression for their
vocal stance against the EPS and the government’s
perpetual crackdown against undocumented workers, they
were supported by their many solidarity partners, and
participated in a wide variety of protests and
solidarity campaigns. This protection enabled them to
have access to public space to get their message
heard, to speak about their resentment at being
excluded, and to associate with workers whom have
similar grievances. Migrant workers became a fixture
at the weekly protests, including those of the
organized trade unions, as well as informal
organizations of casual and contingent workers, and
protest by urban dwellers displaced by Seoul’s latest
urban redevelopment schemes. The ETU-MB also worked
underground to mobilize migrants in the communities
where they live and work. For example, in the spring,
when migrant workers at a refrigerator factory went on
wildcat strike to protest workplace conditions, the
ETU-MB stepped in to help workers negotiate their
demands. 

The ETU-MB has also seen an incredible amount of
violence this past year; thus, there are plenty of
reasons why their collective morale is down. Mohammed
Bidduth, one of the ETU-MB’s key organizers, was
deported to Bangladesh in January 2004 and
subsequently charged under an obscure National
Security Law for associating with labor unions in
South Korea (his case, however, was later through out
of court). Samar Thapa, Chair of the Myeongdong Sit-in
Struggle Collective (MSSC), was snatched by undercover
immigration officers as he handed out pamphlets in
February 2004. Subsequently, Samar and other ETU-MB
members and detainees in two detention centers began
hunger strikes to protest the government’s repressive
crackdown. In response, the South Korean government
stepped up the deportations of these detained migrant
workers, some who were still in poor health as a
result of the hunger strike. 

Repressive and illegal violence seemed to surround
most of the ETU-MB’s activities, many demonstrations
ended in skirmishes with riot police and immigration
officials, whose strategies literally, at times,
included hit and run tactics, running buses in
protests to break them up, with the help of stun guns
and police charges as well. Through most of the year,
therefore, ETU-MB activists regarded church sanctuary
as their only safe space. 

For many, the Myeongdong sit-in site has come to
symbolize a space of hope. In practice, it embodied
dreams of rights and equality as migrant workers
shared the close quarters of the cathedral steps with
their supporters and activists from other labor unions
who have been forced to seek out the sanctuary of
these church steps because of their opposition
activities. After all, the Myeongdong Cathedral is the
symbolic center of the Korean left, the only site of
sanctuary during the military dictatorship, and the
place from where the minjung movement mobilized the
vocal display of han leading up to the events of June
1987 that toppled the dictatorship. 

Sunday’s closing rally saw more emotional tears of han
shed as migrants recollected many of the moments of
their last year of struggle. As the rally drew to a
close, and a long line of speakers wrapped up their
speeches to the more than five hundred migrant workers
and supporters assembled at the sit-in site, the
ETU-MB vowed to continue its struggle against the
government’s policies towards migrant workers. With
winter coming, however, it seems likely that the
leadership will take some time to reconsider their
strategy for the coming year, keeping their han
underground for the next little while as they
coordinate the next round of struggle with their
allies in Korea’s social movements. It is possible
that the ETU-MB will form a wider organization with
other trade unions, and concentrate more on mobilizing
migrant workers in their workplaces in the industrial
satellites of Seoul and other cities. 

Whatever strategy the ETU-MB eventually decides upon,
however, in the meantime, it seems that the
government’s two-tier approach to migrant workers is
bound to quicken the pace at which feelings of
resentment build up, especially among the 180,000
migrant workers who will find their situation growing
more desperate as the nights grow colder. Hopefully,
the next time their han breaks to the surface, the
ETU-MB will have reconstituted sufficiently and will
continue to provide their fellow migrants with a voice
from which to air their resentment at the continued
injustice of South Korea’s migrant labor policies. 

Jamie Doucette lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.
The Equality Trade Union Migrant’s Branch is on the
web at http://migrant.nodong.net



		
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