The South Korean government's latest plan to encourage couples to have more children and prevent a devastating population decline: low-wage immigrant nannies.
In August, the Seoul government launched a program uniting 100 Filipinos babysitters with 169 households that have children under 12 years old or are expecting a baby. Nannies work full or part time and earn the minimum wage of about $7 an hour.
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has called the service beneficial to all migrant workers and south korean parents.
“I wanted to offer a new option to the many dual-income couples who are giving up on having children because of costs,” she said when the trial program was announced last year.
It hasn't gone well. Last month, two of the Filipino workers walked away from their jobs and reported poor working conditions to the of the Philippine government Department of Migrant Workers.
The women were later detained by South Korean immigration authorities in the port city of Busan, where they had found clandestine jobs as cleaners, before being deported last week.
At a hearing session held by the government after the incident, other Filipino workers in the program reported that having to travel between multiple homes taxed them so much that they had to eat at subway stations. They also complained that they were subject to a 10pm curfew on their dormitories.
Ajit Roy, 41, travels by metro to a doctor's appointment. He is a migrant worker from Bangladesh who worked at a South Korean agricultural machinery company until 2021, when he developed a lung disease that he believes is related to his work grinding and degreasing tractor parts.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Instances)
“As we are adults, I think we should have the freedom to decide how we are going to spend our time,” testified a young worker named Joan.
Amid the avalanche of criticism that followed, the city abolished the curfew and announced improvements that included paying them every two weeks and shortening travel distances.
“I would like people to understand that we are in the process of identifying any shortcomings,” Oh said in response to his critics, adding that he was exploring the possibility of expanding the program to Cambodia and other poor Southeast Asian countries.
But experts say the mayor's vision of cheap, outsourced child care is little more than a Band-Aid for a problem with much deeper roots.
More than the lack of available caregivers, they say, the problem is the disproportionate burden of child care falling on south korean women That is discouraging them from having children.
The average number of babies a South Korean woman has in her lifetime has been steadily declining for decades, reaching a record low of 0.72 last year, the lowest in the world.
(Jean Chung / For The Instances)
“If anything, I think this plan could actually make things worse,” said Lee Joo-hee, a sociologist who studies care work at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “All it does is reinforce the idea that domestic work is something so trivial that it can simply be outsourced to 'foreign aunts.' “These perceptions will only drive men away from doing their share of domestic work.”
Lee noted that the term “aunts,” which is common language for domestic workers in South Korea, underscores these gender biases.
“It reflects this attitude that assumes that care work is an exclusive duty of women,” she said.
South Korea fertility rate (the average number of babies a woman has in her lifetime) has been steadily declining for decades and last year hit a record low of 0.72, the lowest in the world. At that rate, the population would fall from 52 million to 36 million over the next three decades.
Population decline is already causing labor shortages in agriculture and manufacturing, and South Korea has reluctantly turned to workers from less developed Asian countries to help. cover the hole.
Proponents of Oh's plan have argued that the child care and domestic service industries also desperately need reinforcements.
The number of domestic workers in the country has halved in the last decade, from 22,600 in 2014 to just over 10,000 last year, according to the government.
However, critics of the nanny pilot program have noted that there is no realistic way to make it affordable enough for widespread adoption. middle class families that I would need it more.
“This is just a solution for the upper class, not a plan that can address the problem of care work for the general public,” said Chang Ha-na, general secretary of women's rights group Political Mamas.
Households participating in the program pay about $1,700 a month for eight hours of help a day. Although it is slightly cheaper than local services, it is still almost half of the average monthly household income of newlywed couples.
To reduce these costs, Oh and her supporters have called for another controversial solution: reclassifying migrant domestic workers so that they are no longer subject to minimum wage laws.
But Labor Minister Kim Moon-soo said that would not only violate domestic and international law, but would also result in more deserters.
“We've already had two workers walk away from their jobs,” Kim said recently. “We will end up with a problem hundreds of times worse.”
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