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Mar. 29  2024
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Women & Migrant Work

At present, more than 150 million people are working abroad have been left their home countries as migrant workers. And the ratio of migrant women workers is increasing more and more.

Source  :  Asian Workers News


By Jeong Gue-sun, President of FWR

At present, more than 150 million people are working abroad have been left their home countries as migrant workers. And the ratio of migrant women workers is increasing more and more.

On the one hand, the increase of women's ratios could be read as the social activities of women being more active and the position of women being higher than before, but when we see the work they do and their conditions in Asian countries, we can see it is far from it.
Women from the Philippines and Indonesia, countries which have the highest rate of women working abroad, are working as domestic helpers and in low-wage industries in Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Saudi-Arabia, etc. Most of these women leave their hometown with the burden of a poor livelihood because they couldn't find jobs inside their own countries.

According to the reports of international human rights groups, there are so many cases of slave labour as some workers worked inside house while the employer outside locked up the door.

n some cases, these women suffer from the violence and sexual violence of employers. And in some cases, they are expelled for suspicion of theft, without having been paid for some years etc.

But the more serious problem is that the influx of women in the sex industry is increasing. As the business of sex industry is becoming bigger in Asia, trafficking and prostitution of women is becoming more systematic.
Women from Burma, Cambodia, and Laos are flowing into the Thai sex industry; women from Thailand and the Philippines are flowing into the Japanese sex industry; and women from the Philippines and Russia are flowing into the Korean sex industry.

Of course, migrant women occupy the bottom end of the labour market in receiving countries, and usually they are not be protected by any legal assistance.

Even though the amount of migrant women is increasing, there are limitations on men to go abroad and work. That is why women are easily to be migrant workers, so they repeatedly to work abroad again. Because the Korean government allow for migrant workers to work in the manufacturing and entertainment industries, the rate of migrant women workers is lower than other Asian countries. And then all migrant workers, men and women, have no rights or status as labour in Korea. The most important point is to secure their rights and status as labour.

But it's the same situation for Russian women. They are also not, protected by any legal assistance, and compared to other women in other Asian countries, they are even worse off.

Korean women also face discrimination of gender and social rights, but migrant women are suffering as both women and migrant workers. This is the problem for all Asian women.

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