Migrant workers aboard S. Korean fishing boats regularly abused and exploited

Ari Purboyo, the head of the Korean branch of the Indonesia Fishing Boat Migrant Workers, describes the abusive and exploitative conditions that migrant workers face on South Korean fishing boats in Seoul on Jan. 7. (Park Jong-shik, staff photographer)

Survey of 81 migrant workers reveals disturbing practices

Ari Purboyo, the head of the Korean branch of the Indonesia Fishing Boat Migrant Workers, describes the abusive and exploitative conditions that migrant workers face on South Korean fishing boats in Seoul on Jan. 7. (Park Jong-shik, staff photographer)

Xu Ly Tho (pseudonym), a migrant fishing boat worker from Vietnam, was assaulted with a shovel by South Korean crew members on a boat. At the time, he was attempting to take a brief rest while busily taking down a net in the darkness of early morning after a brief three-hour sleep on a wooden plank.

“I was very hungry, so I ate something, and they hit me on the back with a shovel while preventing me from eating,” he said.

Migrant workers who have come to South Korea to work in the fishing industry are being subjected to physical and verbal assault and wage exploitation. At the Girl Scouts Building in Seoul’s Jung (Central) District on Jan. 7, the Human Rights Networks for Fishing Boat Migrant Workers announced findings from a survey of 81 migrant workers on South Korean fishing boats.

According to the findings, migrant crew members were chiefly being subjected to verbal abuse, including terms such as “saekkiya” (“son of a bitch”) and “ssibal nom” (“fucking asshole”). Two out of three were working extremely long periods of up to 16 hours a day, while 92% reported being unable to take a single day off. Vietnamese worker “A,” who worked on a squid-fishing boat in Busan, reported, “They curse at you if you eat a lot, and they curse at you if you don’t eat much. They curse at you if you eat quickly, and they curse at you if you eat slowly.” Another Indonesian worker “B,” who worked on a beltfish boat in South Gyeongsang, said, “The curses just go in one ear and out the other. If you kept them in your mind, they would fill several rooms.”

Wage discrimination and deceptive practices qualify as human trafficking

No. of migrant workers on S. Korean boats in 2018

Wage exploitation remained a serious problem, despite the issue receiving major attention in the wake of an international scandal when migrant crew members on the South Korean vessel Oyang 75 left en masse in 2012 after being unable to tolerate the physical abuse and wage exploitation there. Forty-three out of the 63 workers who agreed to answer wage-related questions said they were receiving less than the minimum wage.

“The South Korean crew members in their 60s and 70s didn’t do much work and gave everything to us to do, and they received 3.5 million won (US$2,988) a month,” A reported. “Even the Korean head cook earned over 3 million won (US$2,561) a month just for cooking, whereas I received 300,000 won (US$256) working as head cook.”

Illegal brokers consistently overcharge workers for job placement

Another persistent problem concerned the illegal practice of brokers charging exorbitant “job placement fees.” The survey found that migrant crew members from Indonesia and Vietnam had respectively paid an average of 5 million won (US$4,270) and 10 million won (US$8,541) in dispatching fees. In some cases, crew members’ land documents and diplomas were held as security when they went to work on the boats. Some workers also paid “flight deposits”  a sum of money paid in advance to ensure against workers fleeing the boats. The study found that Indonesian and Vietnamese crew members had respectively paid an average of 2 million won (US$1,708) and 4.8 million won (US$4,099) for flight deposits.

Forced to rely on barges and uninhabited islands in the sea for their accommodations, some workers faced conditions tantamount to imprisonment. Catholic Sister Marie Solina, who surveyed housing conditions for migrant fishing boat workers in Jeolla Province, reported, “They would provide workers with conditions without insulation or heating, completely isolated from any kind of social infrastructure, and then tell them, ‘It’s probably better than a hotel in your country.’”

Jeong Sin-yeong, an attorney with Advocates for Public Interest Law (APIL), explained, “Internationally, human trafficking refers to the act of recruiting or transporting people for purposes of labor exploitation through the use of fraud or deception or exploitation of vulnerable status. [The housing conditions identified in the study] could be seen as amounting to lawful human trafficking.”

“We need to reinforce the public sector’s role in the migrant fishing boat worker recruitment and job placement processes and eliminate wage and accident compensation discrimination based on nationality,” Jeong said.

“We also need to amend the law to prohibit conditions that amount to imprisonment,” she added.

By Lee Wan, staff reporter

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