South Korea wants Southeast Asian domestic workers to support families. But are they welcome?

South Korea's pilot plan to allow families to hire Southeast Asian domestic workers, aimed at easing the burden of household chores and childcare and addressing the world's lowest birth rate, is drawing debate over the programme's effectiveness and potential cultural barriers and discrimination.

The Ministry of Employment and Labour and city authorities in Seoul are reportedly reviewing a scheme to bring domestic helpers from countries including the Philippines to help families simultaneously work and raise children.

"Within the first half of this year, we will draw up detailed plans on how to introduce the foreign domestic worker system, including when and how many workers will be involved" in the pilot, a ministry official said this month.

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South Korea currently only allows Chinese nationals of Korean descent to work as foreign domestic workers. They receive around 13,000 won (US$9.81) per hour, according to media reports, have a union and are given a working visit visa.

The discussion over accepting foreign domestic workers from Southeast Asia was first brought up by Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon in September.

According to Statistics Korea, the country's birth rate plummeted to 0.78 in 2022, ranking at the bottom among the 38 OECD nations, despite the government spending 2.8 trillion won (US$2.1 billion) over the past 16 years to tackle the problem, including housing and childcare subsidies.

While paternity and maternity leave is available, Korean working culture can be intense, so that period off is not always properly used. And although men did not do housework or look after children in the past and more are doing so now, many families still find it hard to strike a healthy balance between the workplace and home.

"It is now time for our society to build a more tightly knit system to allow people to work and raise children at the same time," Oh said in a Facebook post last month. "There are voices against the [foreign domestic worker plan], but there is no good and evil in the system. We simply need to take the advantages it presents."

Oh also cited Nobel laureate and economist Michael Kremer, who said South Korea needed an immigration policy and highlighted Hong Kong and Singapore as examples of cities that had implemented special visa schemes for foreign domestic workers.

Some 340,000 women, mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia, work as foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. There are 268,500 such employees in Singapore, with five Southeast Asian countries - Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines - among the list of approved source regions.

South Korea plans to issue E-9 visas - a non-professional stay permit of up to three years - for such helpers by adding domestic work to the list of fields allowed under the employment permit system. Families in Seoul can start hiring workers through certified service providers later this year.

During the pilot foreign domestic workers will earn a minimum wage of 9,620 won (US$7.20) per hour, over 30 per cent lower than that of Korean domestic helpers, who earn an average of 15,000 won per hour.

Foreign helpers - many of whom have little choice but to leave their own children behind to move overseas for jobs, then send most of their wages home - are also likely to commute rather than work as live-in helpers. There were no details given on where the overseas workers might live in South Korea.

Lee Sang-lim, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA), said the government considered the high cost of childcare and poor work-family balance as the key cause of the country's population woes.

Government statistics showed that the average household monthly spend on childcare was about 976,000 won (US$736) in 2021, up from 869,000 won in 2018. Meanwhile, the legal working week is 52 hours, one of the world's longest.

While women often used to drop out of the workforce after having children, now there are more dual-income families, as many women have been better educated in recent years and have continued their careers.

Still, Lee said the pilot policy "wouldn't have much effect" if foreign workers' wages eventually grow to become comparable to that of a local's, as there would be little incentive to hire people from overseas.

"For example, about 15 to 20 years ago, there were a lot of Chinese nationals of Korean descent serving in restaurants. Now they are all gone because their wage has gone up to almost the same level as Korean workers," said Lee.

While it might seem cheaper to employ them now, "it will eventually adjust to the market level", he said, amid competition to hire during labour shortages pushing up wages.

According to a poll from Hankook Research in August last year, 85.2 per cent of the 1,000 respondents said the ideal salary for foreign domestic helpers was "below 1.9 million won (US$1,400) per month", lower than the proposed 2 million won for working the statutory 52 hours per week at the minimum wage.

To reduce the cost of hiring domestic helpers, Representative Cho Jung-hun of the minor opposition party Transition Korea proposed a bill in March exempting foreign childcare workers from the minimum wage payment system, but backtracked after the public and unions accused him of discriminating against foreign employees.

Lee Byung-hoon, a sociology professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, questioned whether the programme would bear fruit given few people were likely to trust an outsider to take care of their children.

"I think the cultural barrier would play a role in easily leaving their child to foreigners," he said.

South Korea is a largely homogenous society, and cultural minorities are known to face social exclusion or discrimination.

Lee Sang-lim from the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs said the nation had a growing need for care workers for elderly people too.

"The demand for care will explode, and it will be difficult to bear with [demand] ... We should not view this only as a low birth rate issue but as a structural problem with a shortage of local workers," he said.

Lee said South Korea had to reform education and the intense work culture to encourage couples to have children.

"There must be a reconsideration of high private education expenses and the university entrance examination-oriented education system," he said. "A 52-hour work week is also helpful for the work-family balance."

Lee added that the government also needed careful planning to combine immigration policy with healthcare systems, and prepare for illegal immigration.

He said there were many cases where foreign workers enter South Korea with an E-9 visa before taking other jobs and remaining in the country illegally. He said that the domestic helper pilot policy could be another route for that to happen.

Sociologist Lee Byung-hoon said that in time, South Korea would gradually accommodate a more "open" immigration policy.

"In the long term, an increase in foreign labourers and multiculturalism would drive South Korea" to head in the direction of Hong Kong and Singapore, he said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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