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The government has intervened to deal with the human rights and earnings problems of foreign laborers in the country. There have been reports of abuses committed against vulnerable foreign workers by some local employers including battery, refusal to pay wages and failure to provide compensation or treatment to victims of work-related accidents. For their part, the foreign workers have shown an increased awareness of the need to protect their rights. Their countries of origin have asked the government to do something about the problem. International human rights organizations have joined in this demand.

The administration and the ruling Millennium Democratic Party recently launched a comprehensive effort to deal with the problem on the initiative of President Kim Dae-jung, a champion of human rights causes. He regards the alleged rights violations and discrimination against foreign workers as shameful acts in a country that values its reputation for hospitality to guests.

Within months, a committee on the protection of the human rights of foreign laborers will be launched by officials of the Justice, Labor and Commerce, Industry and Energy ministries and civic organizations. Prosecution authorities will appoint a prosecutor at each of their district offices to handle allegations concerning criminal offenses against foreign workers. In addition, administrative sanctions may be used against local employers in the event they infringe on the rights of their foreign employees. For example, offending employers could be sanctioned by being deprived of the privilege to employ foreign "industrial trainees."

A measure to boost the income of foreign workers is being considered as well. It would lengthen the training period of industrial trainees from two to three years and would allow those who finish their apprenticeship to work with an official visa for an additional two years, instead of the present one year. Among other things, the measure is aimed at preventing such trainees from leaving their workplaces for better-paying jobs and thus becoming illegal aliens. The Ministry of Justice will submit a bill to the National Assembly to put this plan into effect within the next several months.

"Foreign industrial trainees" were introduced into Korea in 1991 for training in the skills they needed to acquire to work at the overseas worksites of their Korean employers. Later when workers at small- and medium-sized factories left their so-called 3-D (dirty, difficult or dangerous) work for better-paying construction and service industry jobs, these businesses began to suffer manpower shortages. They resorted to the training program for foreigners as a way to find recruits at a low cost. Since those foreigners are hired through a contracting system, they are required to work at the places they are hired through the contracted period, which is now two years.

But in recent years, some of the foreign industrial trainees ran away from their jobs for better-paying work at other workplaces. This prompted affected employers to keep watch over their foreign workers and, in some cases, to confiscate their passports. Some foreigners complained that they could not send their earnings home because they could not produce their passports at the bank. Other foreigners reported that they were beaten by Korean employees at their workplaces. Other abuses committed against foreign laborers by their employers and Korean colleagues were said to have been unreported to the authorities because they were in a vulnerable situation as illegal aliens.

The forthcoming committee will have to work out effective measures to deal with, or better still, to prevent rights violations such as these. Some critics doubt that the purported plan will be able to cope with the problem in a market economy in which small businesses continue to vie for cheap labor. This is why some in the government and the business community suggest replacing the current system of hiring unskilled foreign workers with a system that allows foreigners to land jobs with work permits. Opponents of the idea contend that such a system would cause upward pressure on wages as well as other operational problems for businesses. Still, the suggestion is worth considering as a long-term possibility.

The current system of importing industrial trainees through recruitment agencies and supplying them to businesses needs to be improved. The firms in need of foreign workers would do better by selecting recruits through direct involvement in the recruitment process. In this age of globalization, they must make greater efforts to work with their foreign employees open-heartedly and with prudence.