issue 27 news and updates

With 286 foreign workers, including Thai workers, entering Korea on October 4 (Monday), the introduction of new foreign workforce under the Employment Permit System launched on August 17 has started in earnest.

The number of foreign workers introduced this time totals 286, consisting 47 Thais arriving on October 4, 110 Vietnamese, 104 Mongolians, and 50 Philippine workers arriving on October 5. They are going to work for 100 Korean companies across the country, including those located in Seoul and Kyeongin area.

* From now on, foreign workforce will be imported into Korea regularly, once or more every week.

A remarkable thing is that among the foreign workers entering this time are three Mongolians who voluntarily left Korea during the last voluntary departure period (Sept. 1~Feb. 28).

These three Mongolians became the first lucky workers to be included in a list of job seekers and allowed into Korea after voluntarily leaving Korea according to the government’s policy encouraging the voluntary departure of foreign workers.

* At present, a total of 89 among the foreign workers who had left voluntarily have signed employment contract through job placement services. All of them will enter Korea again sooner or later and work for another three years in the same workplaces where they used to work.

As of September 30, in the lists of job seekers sent by sending countries, there are 384 foreign workers who have applied to re-enter Korea for employment after voluntarily departure. They consist of 147 Mongolians, 96 Filipinos, 68 Vietnamese, 61 Sri Lankas, 61 Indonesians and 4 Thais.

The number of foreign workers in all six sending countries, who are entitled to re-enter Korea after their voluntary departure, is 12,635 in total. The employers whose foreign workers voluntarily left can re-hire the same foreign workers after obtaining an employment permit from an employment security center of the Ministry of Labor.

Most of the workers entering this time are high-quality workforce with high school education or higher and job experiences in the manufacturing industry in their home countries. Their average age is 28, with 196 of them in their twenties and 90 in their thirties. The number of high school graduates or higher is 243, representing 85% of the total, of which 252 are male and 34 female(43 middle school graduates, 172 high school graduates, 71 college graduates).

* Public (government) agencies of sending countries receive job-seeking applications through open recruitment and select qualified workers following the objective selection criteria presented by the Korean government, such as Korean language proficiency, age, experiences, educational attainment, the results of health examinations, etc.

To improve their employability and encourage their earlier establishment in Korea, the workers were required to complete 150-hour pre-training, including Korean language training, provided by training institutions designated by the sending countries.

* The pre-training provided before entry cover such areas as Korean language(80 hours), understanding of Korean culture(7 hours), understanding of the Employment Permit System(13 hours), industrial safety(15 hours), skill education(35 hours), etc.

In particular, as public agencies are put in charge of sending workforce and provide their services, such as job placement and the signing of employment contracts, using computers, the total sending price, including airfares, has been reduced to an average of $630(756,000 won) per worker.

* The sending price includes airfare, pre-training expenses, health examination expenses, fees for issuing a worker’s visa and passport.

Sending prices vary from country to country - $370 in the Philippines, $603 in Thailand, $699 in Vietnam, and $850 in Mongolia, etc. - depending on airfares.

Most of the wages (basic wages) for foreign workers are set at the minimum wage level of about 650,000~700,000 won. If allowances and bonuses for overtime, extended and night work are added, their average monthly wages are expected to reach 1,000,000 won.

The 100 companies that will employ the foreign workers introduced this time are small and medium manufacturing companies in the central area(83 companies) such as Seoul and Kyeongin province, the south western area(1 company) and the south eastern area(16 companies) of Korea.

They belong to 3-D industries, such as textile manufacturing, auto parts manufacturing, metal processing, and machine parts manufacturing, which have difficulty filling vacancies with native Koreans.

The Ministry of Labor has continued monitoring since the launch of the Employment Permit System on August 17 to ensure its smooth implementation.

The Ministry has already received lists of 21,488 carefully selected workers from six sending countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Mongolia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

As of October 1, a total of 4,150 workplaces were issued with a document confirming their labor shortages. Of them, 2,279 workplaces have completed their job-offering application to fill 7,485 vacancies.

Employment permits have been issued for the employment of a total of 4,698 foreign workers, of which 3,812 have concluded their employment contracts and are in the process of entering Korea.

Except for the fact that the construction industry will offer fewer jobs due to the arrival of winter season and its business downturn, workforce introduction will be carried out without any delay in the manufacturing industry.

* A survey is underway to know about the demand for foreign workforce by construction companies currently involved in construction work whose cost amounts to 30 billion won or more.
As Al Qaeda has recently threatened terror attacks on Korea and labor supply under the Employment Permit System started in earnest from October, the government has decided to conduct massive crackdown on illegal foreigners and their employers.

Since the start of the Employment Permit System in August, the government has expanded infrastructures for crackdown by opening a shelter for illegal foreign workers in Cheongju and conducted strong on-going joint crackdown led by the Ministry of Justice and the police, which is turning out to be considerably effective.

The joint crackdown will be further strengthened in October.

Along with enlightenment campaign to encourage the voluntary departure among illegal foreign workers, the government is planning to conduct crackdown focused on punishing employers who hire illegal foreign workers through arrest and investigation.

Discussions between relevant ministries are underway to find various ways to increase the effectiveness of crackdown, such as reward for reporting illegal employment agents and brokers.

From October 1, 2004, employers who newly hire the disabled will be given a subsidy of 450,000~600,000 won per month for one year.
On October 1, the Ministry of Labor newly introduced a system of providing subsidy to promote the new hiring of the disabled by revising the Enforcement Decree of the Employment Insurance Act.

The subsidy for new hiring of the disabled under the Employment Insurance Act is provided to employers, if the employers newly hire as the insured the disabled who have been unemployed for more than three months(one month in the case of the seriously disabled) after registering themselves as job seekers with an employment security center of the Ministry of Labor or the Korea Employment Promotion Agency for the Disabled; pay at least minimum wages to them; and do not dismiss any workers through employment adjustment in the three months before and six months after the hiring.
A monthly subsidy of 450,000 won for the lightly disabled and 600,000 won for the seriously disabled is provided for 12 months after the new hiring.

Any employers who want to receive this subsidy should only submit an application for subsidy and required documents to an employment security center during the month following the new hiring.

Up until now, subsidy for employment of the disabled, financed from the Employment Promotion Fund for the Disabled, has been offered only to companies (3,107 companies in 2003) which hire the disabled more than the compulsory hiring rate of 2%, unlike long-term job seekers, the aged, female household heads, etc.(a sort of subsidy for hiring of large numbers of workers).

By making it possible for around 920,000 companies covered by employment insurance to receive subsidy for one year when newly hiring the disabled, the newly introduced subsidy is expected to largely reduce the corporate burden caused by hiring the disabled.

In particular, given the current situation in which the hiring rate of the disabled in most of the major companies falls short of 2%, the government has decided to provide the high-level subsidy for new hiring of the disabled to any companies newly hiring the disabled for a certain period regardless of their hiring rate.

By contrast, from next year (January 2005), the government will lower the level of subsidy for employment of the disabled that has been paid in the case of hiring large numbers of the disabled.

The introduction of the new subsidy will not only increase the new hiring of the disabled especially among companies with 2% or more disabled workers, that is, low-paid jobs in small companies. It will also help to ease the lack of the hiring of the disabled by most of the major companies providing decent jobs.

With the introduction of the new subsidy, the government has now moved away from the previous passive policy of compulsorily requiring companies to hire the disabled and levying contributions, in case they fail to comply, and towards giving incentives for employers to try to meet the requirement by hiring more disabled workers. In this respect, the new subsidy is likely to serve as an important turning point from regulation-oriented employment policy for the disabled to support-oriented one.

The subsidy for new hiring of the disabled prescribed by the Employment Insurance Act is intended to promote new hiring and relieve employment inequality by providing support for employers hiring the disabled who have difficulty getting a job under the ordinary circumstances of the labor market.

This subsidy is different from the subsidy for employment of the disabled prescribed by the Act on Employment Promotion and Vocational Rehabilitation for the Disabled in that the latter is aimed at striking a balance between employers hiring the disabled more than the compulsory hiring rate and employers failing to comply by adjusting their costs of hiring the disabled.

However, while receiving the subsidy for new hiring, employers are not provided with the subsidy for employment of the disabled.

* The subsidy for employment of the disabled under the Act on Employment Promotion and Vocational Rehabilitation is provided for an indefinite period to employers who hire the disabled more than 2% of their workforce.