At a large strawberry farm in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province, about a dozen foreign workers do the same job, yet the visas they hold are all different. Some entered through the Employment Permit System (E-9) run by the Ministry of Employment and Labor, while others came through the Seasonal Worker Program (E-8) operated by the Ministry of Justice and local governments. A fisheries company in Tongyeong, South Gyeongsang Province, which runs both coastal fishing and oyster farming, likewise employs Employment Permit System (E-9) workers and seaman employment (E-10) workers managed by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries separately. During closed fishing seasons or off-peak periods, it would be convenient to deploy foreign seaman-employment workers to the aquaculture farm, but under the current system, seaman-employment workers are barred from working at aquaculture farms.
As such, foreign workers are effectively used as a single labor pool at farming and fishing sites, but the government's management system is split by visa type, prompting calls for related institutional reform. In practice, long-term labor falls under the Employment Permit System and short-term labor under the Seasonal Worker Program, so employers must go through separate procedures for each program to hire the workers concerned. Critics say such ministry silos make it harder to respond to labor shortages on the ground and widen management blind spots.
According to government ministries on Wednesday, the government-wide "integrated support roadmap for foreign labor" has been postponed indefinitely, missing its original target of a release in June this year. Late last year, the government formed a task force involving labor and management, related ministries, and experts to discuss ways to manage foreign labor that had been scattered by visa type. It also announced its policy direction at an economic ministers' meeting in April, but no final plan has emerged on how to coordinate visa-specific programs such as the Employment Permit System, the Seasonal Worker Program, and seaman employment.
The roadmap discussions have failed to gain momentum because of the different authorities and program operation methods across ministries. Currently, the Ministry of Justice handles the Seasonal Worker Program as well as immigration and residence management, the Ministry of Employment and Labor handles the Employment Permit System, and the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries handles seaman-employment-related programs, while other central ministries each run their own programs. There is a shared understanding of the need for integrated management of foreign labor, but no conclusion has been reached on issues such as calculating and allocating total labor volume, managing dispatch, and the authority to inspect working conditions.
In the farming and fishing sector in particular, how to redesign the relationship between the Employment Permit System and the Seasonal Worker Program is cited as a key point of contention. Farming and fishing communities need both short-term labor for harvest season and permanent labor, but the Employment Permit System assumes long-term employment of at least three years, making it difficult to meet peak-season demand. The Seasonal Worker Program, by contrast, allows farms to quickly deploy labor when needed, establishing itself as a system to fill short-term labor shortages.
The problem is that management of the surging seasonal labor demand is left solely to local governments, leaving considerable gaps in the management system. According to related statistics, the number of seasonal workers allocated rose more than 10-fold in four years, from 11,000 in 2022 to 117,000 this year. Yet at many local governments, the number of officials in charge of foreign labor still stands at just one or two. This is why critics say local governments cannot handle everything from agreements with overseas local governments, coordinating entry schedules, allocating workers to farms, and checking working conditions, to managing runaways on their own. One local government official said, "The reality is that it is difficult for melon farms that need labor for only eight to 10 months to use the Employment Permit System, which requires employment for three years or more."
Gaps in the system can also lead to broker involvement. In fact, 91 Filipino seasonal workers who worked at a farm in Yanggu County, Gangwon Province, filed a complaint with the Ministry of Employment and Labor, claiming that the roughly 1.2 billion won a broker firm embezzled under the guise of fees over about two years was their wages. Lee Chul-seung, head of the Gyeongnam Migrant Center, noted, "Seasonal workers pay private brokers in their home countries fees of as much as around 10 million won to enter the country."
Experts point out that Korea's tendency to view foreign workers as a short-term means of supplying labor rather than as long-term members of the labor market has led to siloed management, worsening the inefficiency of the foreign labor system and related problems. By responding through a method of adding visas for each industry and period as needed, the channels for the inflow of foreign workers have increased, but no integrated management system has been established, they say. Lee Kyu-yong, a senior research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, said, "The fundamental problem is the absence of linked cooperation spanning all areas, including residence, the labor market, welfare, education, and regional extinction," adding, "The establishment of a higher-level ministerial body to organically coordinate these matters should also be considered."
