hankyoreh

while carrying a pile of empty pesticide bottles on his back. On the right are problematic migrant worker contracts that stipulate the working hours

The food on our tables is the product of contracts.
Even if rain falls from the sky and the earth teems with nutrients, lettuce and cabbage do not just hop onto the table on their own. In order for the rice to grow ripe and pigs to grow fat, workers have to sow the seeds, till the earth, harvest the crops - and those workers, of course, have to be given a contract.
South Korea is inundated with unfair contracts that violate promises made to migrants working in the farm and livestock industries, the workers who bring crops from the fields to our plates.

A, as I will call her, is a 30-year-old Nepalese woman who came to South Korea from Kathmandu in 2012. She started working as a migrant laborer in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, on a farm that raised cabbages in the winter. Each day, she worked 11 hours, and after her official working hours were over, she had to fold boxes for about 20 or 30 minutes.

Her contract said that the working day ran from 6 AM to 6 PM. It promised an hour’s break each day and two days off a month. That’s 11 hours a day for 28 days, which works out to a total of 308 hours a month.

But in place of “308,” her contract said “44.” A was working seven times more per month than her contract claimed. The contract was a ludicrous joke that didn‘t make any sense.

According to her contract, A was making around 1.04 million won (US$940) a month. That’s the amount you get when you multiply the minimum hourly wage in 2012, 4,580 won (US$4.15) by eight hours of work a day.

But substitute in A’s actual hours - 11 hours a day - and her hourly wage drops to 3,360 won, just 73% of what the law requires.

A’s contract said she worked an 11-hour day, but it assumed an 8-hour day when calculating her wages. Somehow, it concluded that she was working a total of 44 hours a month. Though it lacked any basis in reality, this contract received official government approval. This woman worked for two years without knowing what her contract really said.

Two women from Cambodia - B, who was 26 years old, and C, who was 24 - joined A at the farm, signing their contracts in 2013. The three women worked together and took breaks together.

Nevertheless, B and C‘s contracts had them working from 7 am until 4 pm. This would imply that they were working eight hours a day, 226 hours a month. Of course, B and C were actually working three hours more a day than the contract said.

They were paid 1,098,360 won a month (about US$1,000), or the 2013 minimum wage of 4,860 won per hour, for just eight hours a day of work. Though they were told to work 11 hours a day, the contract stated they were working eight hours, and they were only paid for eight hours of work a day.

A was frustrated to learn that the only legal document that she could trust and rely on had betrayed her.

“I have no idea why in the world I had to work like that,” she said.

The three workers complained that their wages did not meet the hours that they worked. The document was an alternate, secret contract. This one was euphemistically called a “statement of agreement for foreign workers signing their employment contract.”

The agreement, which was written in Korean and English, had been printed under the name “[name redacted] greenhouse vegetables crop unit with [name redacted] agricultural cooperative.” The document strongly appeared to have been prepared by the crop unit in question.

A crop unit is a group of farmers who work together to produce and ship a given crop.

The agreement reads as follows:

“When a worker leaves the company without a legitimate reason or before a replacement worker is hired, that worker will provide the farmer with 1.5 million won (US$1,360) in compensation.”

When workers want to change their place of employment because their employer is behind on their wages or is not abiding by terms of the contract, it is common for the employer to ask them for money to compensate the administrative cost that goes into hiring a migrant worker.

Two men who worked at the same farm paid 600,000 won and 1.1 million won, respectively, to get permission to change jobs, A said.

But there was more. The contract also threatened that workers could be docked a day’s pay for getting in the way, refusing work, or not doing their best. Workers who missed work or left their work station without permission could lose a day of vacation or three day’s pay, it said.

Another passage in the contract had been written with the three women in mind. “Staying in the dormitory costs 250,000 won a month, a cost that workers are responsible for. This cost may be adjusted according to the season, and overtime pay may be used to cover this cost,” it said.

The women had been asking to be paid for their work, including their overtime hours. This package in the document was an attempt to neutralize these demands by tricking them into allowing their overtime pay to apply to their housing cost.

A refused to sign the contract. This enraged her employer, who refused to give her any more work. She had to quit her job, without being paid her regular wages or overtime pay for the month when the dispute occurred, her severance pay, or even the wages for her first 10 days on the job.

A found a new job at an egg-packing company in North Chungcheong Province.

A still hasn’t seen the contract at her current place of employment - the woman in charge won’t show it to her. Without having seen the contract, she isn’t completely sure what her work is at the new job.

Whenever there are no eggs to pack, she is put to work in the boss’s field. Sometimes, she is sent to her boss’s house to pick weeds or clean the house. She gets one day off a month.

A pamphlet that the Ministry of Employment and Labor published last year about the job permit system explains that farms are not required to give migrant workers any days off.

When A tries to leave the workplace after work on a weekday, her boss stops her. Her boss is worried she will get sick if she goes out.

“I’m so afraid of my boss that I can’t help obeying her,” A said, trapped on the other end of the phone.

The migrant workers in South Korea’s farm and livestock business are living in a world where illogical contracts receive official approval, a world in which contracts do not reflect reality. Deceptive contracts and secret contracts are rampant.

There are several kinds of problematic contracts.

One kind is exemplified by the contract received by a 25-year-old Cambodian woman I will refer to as D, who arrived in Korea in 2013. D’s contract stipulates that she works 11 hours a day and gets two days off a month. It states that she is to work a total of 308 hours a month and be paid 1.02 million won a month.

D’s monthly wages - calculated by multiplying the minimum wage at the time of the contract, 4,860 won, by 308 hours - ought to be around 1.5 million won. The contract is honest about her working hours, but it conceals her wages.

This isn’t even all that bad, as far as contracts go. Some don’t even specify the number of hours worked. Others boldly demand 350 hours of work a month.

It is also common for contracts to disregard basic arithmetic. E, a 26-year-old Cambodian woman who arrived in South Korea in 2013, signed a contract stating that she is to work from 6 am to 6 pm. The contract guarantees him an hour of break time every day and two days off a week.

But his employer wrote in the contract that the total number of hours she works each month is not 308, but 226. Her pay is calculated on a basis of 226 hours as well. It would be hard not to see this as deliberate.

In Aug. 2013, when E worked 319 hours, his average hourly wage was 3,448 won. His employer still owes him 4.4 million won (about US$4,000), or four and a half months pay, and he is working at a location different from the one specified on the contract.

A new trend in recent contracts is exaggerating break time. A 22-year-old man from Cambodia - let’s call him F - works more than 300 hours most months, though he only worked 270 in February of this year.

F‘s contract says that he works from 7 am until 7 pm, but it lists his total working hours per month as 226. The contract claims he has four hours of break time a day. This is one example of how contracts lie about the break time in order to keep the official work day to eight hours, which is then used to calculate wages.

Over the past 14 months, F has missed out on 7 million won (US$6,370) in unpaid overtime wages alone.

The type of deceptive contracts in use corresponds to the legal developments during that period of time.

Before 2012, contracts openly violated the Minimum Age Act. There were no limits on the number of working hours, and numerous contracts defied both the principles of logic and the rules of math.

In 2013, it became more common for the monthly working hours listed in the contract to be fixed at 226 even when the daily hours neared 11. Even when these contracts accidentally revealed the fact that workers were doing overtime, wages were invariably tied to an eight-hour day to keep costs down.

This trend is reflected in the differences that can be observed in the contracts of A, who signed hers in 2012, and B and C, who signed theirs in 2013, even though the three were working on the same farm.

Contracts like F’s that use break time as a trump card for fitting contracts into the eight hours a day, 226 hours a month formula started to become more common in 2014.

Kim Yi-chan, 49, director of a migrant worker shelter in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province called Earthians’ Station, offers an explanation for these trends.

“At the end of 2012, the issue of faulty contracts was raised in the National Assembly. Since that time, an increasing number of contracts state that the total working hours in a month is 226, regardless of the actual hours worked. The next step was increasing break time as a way to resolve the logical gap between the hours worked per day and the hours worked per month,” Kim said.

But fundamentally, these deceptive contracts betray the same fundamental disconnect with reality. The actual working hours are much greater than the number that appears in the contract, and the wages paid assume eight-hour days, regardless of the actual length of the work day. It is also becoming more common for employers to force workers to sign an alternate contract in addition to the official one, just as A, B, and C experienced.

The widespread production of contracts whose promises are meaningless is directly connected to the dysfunctional system of regulation. The government is failing to provide the management and supervision that is supposed to ensure that the language of contracts corresponds with reality.

Recently, the Ministry of Employment and Labor expressed its opposition to a recommendation by the Korean National Human Rights Commission to create a standard work contract customized for each business area to enable migrant laborers working in agriculture and livestock to receive the wages commensurate to their work. The ministry also declined to adopt a recommendation to draft standards for housing, concerned that this might place an excessive burden on employers.

While the ministry is shirking its responsibility to keep tabs on contracts, alternate contracts that arbitrarily define working conditions and housing costs are making a mockery of the standard work contract. Each time the government approves a work contract that could not stand up in a court of law, we are served a meal watered with the tears of migrant workers in the farm and livestock industries.

By Lee Moon-young, Hankyoreh 21 staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/38213.html