I was flipping through TV channels yesterday and saw an interesting scene on a popular Korean soap drama.
Men were lined up in a row, like in the army. A commander of some kind was walking up and down the line, yelling at his men.
But they weren't wearing uniforms. They weren't soldiers, they were construction workers, and it was the beginning of the work day. The leader looked like a drill sergeant, and he occasionally beat the workers.
In western countries, at least in the U.S. and Canada, we have several negative stereotypes of construction workers. That they aren't intelligent, they like to drink beer and eat out of lunchboxes while sitting on high beams, that they couldn't find a job where they can use their brain so they work with their hands.
But there are stereotypes of construction workers that are relatively positive; along the lines of firemen or policemen. Hard working men wearing flannel muscle shirts, bringing home the bread to wifey. These images are not uncommon in American commercials and entertainment.
In Korea construction workers are shit. They are the lowest rung on the social ladder. They are in every sense of the word, slaves.
The money is not horrible, though nothing like it generally is in the United States. Typically, the workers are paid daily. There are construction companies, but by in large it's freelance work, so I've been told.
I once had an English conversation student who worked as a construction worker. He would come to class every day looking like he'd been beaten up. This is not an exaggeration. His hands and face were bruised, sun torched, and his clothes filthy. He'd lie in his chair like a bag of bones and would often have trouble speaking.
He told of getting beaten by his superiors, having rocks thrown at him while doing his job; if he wasn't working fast enough.
If you ever have the pleasure of seeing a building in Korea go up or be torn down you can imagine what's going on inside. These men are often working out of pure fear and they work incredibly fast. Just two buildings down from mine an old office building was complete gutted and cleaned in about a day and a half. All that's standing now is the steel frame. My guess is that in less than a week they'll have a completely new building around it.
I've heard that migrant workers make up a sizeable part of the construction work force in Korea. I haven't seen this first hand, but I have seen migrant workers going off to work in factories.
Yesterday I went to a Pakistani restaurant located in a factory district in Busan. Restaurants like this are almost unheard of in Korea where foreign restaurants are usually confined to the "rich" or university areas of the city. The exception being some Russian and Chinese joints were sailors and soldiers hang out.
But the idea of a restaurant being supported by migrant workers from factories population is quite new. But sure enough, while eating there we saw a handful of workers from Uzbekistan and the Philippines come in.
One man, who was dark skinned, had a Muslim-style beard, and was speaking Russian accented English, looked to be a particularly rough character. He had that "bag of bones" look I referred to earlier. He also had what looked to be a homemade tattoo of a dagger on his arm.
As Korea becomes more of an economic player in the world economy workers like these will likely become more common. Wealthy people don't want to do shitty jobs so they let someone else come to their country and do it.
But I've said before, I can't imagine a worse place to be an immigrant worker than in Korea. I think Japan could be pretty lousy for similar reasons, but Japan is more open to Western ideas so I can't help but think that would lead to slightly better conditions. China would be bad, but China has a relatively mixed population. It'd be summarily bad for Chinese and foreigners alike.
Don't get me wrong, this along with a lot of things, is changing in Korea. But I've always felt that if North and South Korea had an open border there would be such a vicious racism against the people from the North for the same lower on the totem pole ideas.