Korean shipyards offer special treatments to foreign workers amid labor shortage

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co.‘s cafeteria offers customized food menus to foreign workers [Photo provided by HD Hyundai Heavy Industries]

South Korean shipbuilding companies are offering special treatments to foreign laborers to have them work as painters and welders amid the labor shortage of skilled workers in the industry.

According to multiple sources from the shipbuilding industry on Tuesday, Korea’s three major shipbuilders - HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., Samsung Heavy Industries Co., and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. (DSME) - plan to hire an additional 3,100 foreign workers by the end of this year.

HD Hyundai has already hired 580 foreign workers between November last year and March this year and Samsung Heavy and DSME 500 and 600 each.

Most of the workers were assigned to work for their suppliers that have been suffering a shortage in workforce.

Korean shipyards have about four years of work ahead of them on their docks thanks to large-scale orders to build ultra-large liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers that have been coming in since the second half of 2021.

The combined order backlog at the three major shipbuilders stood at $119.5 billion as of the end of February.

The number of workers at the shipyards, however, has almost halved to about 95,000 as of end of December last year from 203,441 in 2014.

The shipbuilders decided to hire foreign workers this year after the government increased the issuance of E-9 work visas to 110,000 this year, the highest level ever.

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co.‘s gym for foreign workers [Photo provided by DSME]

Companies are offering more employee benefits as competition to attract foreign workers intensifies. They offer customized food menus so that the workers can adapt to the environment faster and be more productive at work.

A majority of the foreign workers hired by the Korean shipyards are from Buddhist or Islamic communities, such as Uzbekistan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Some Muslim workers from Uzbekistan or Indonesia do not eat pork for religious reasons.

Hyundai Heavy’s cafeteria offers halal-equivalent menus that contain no alcohol and pork. Local dishes cooked with chicken, such as chicken curry, chicken nanban, and chicken lettuce wraps, are popular among the foreign workers.

Samsung Heavy opens its cafeteria also on weekends and holidays, too, to provide local food to its foreign workers. “During the most recent Ramadan, for example, we provided packaged meals consisting of bread, yogurt and nuts to the workers who were unable to eat during the daytime,” said a Hyundai Heavy official.

Prayer space for religious workers is another consideration. Devout Muslims are expected to pray five times a day. Hyundai Heavy set up a prayer space next to its on-site locker room, and Samsung Heavy has 33-square-meter prayer rooms at its two company dormitories.

DSME also remodeled nine of its dormitories that exclusively house foreign workers last year. Shower heads were all replaced with wall-mounted shower faucets, and well-equipped gyms were added.

“The facilities have been very much improved compared to our earlier facilities,” said a DSME official.

Professional interpreters are also ready on-site.

Hyundai Heavy has recently made a new department aimed at shared growth among workers and it has deployed interpreters for eight languages to help foreign workers communicate across the shipyards. Samsung Heavy has even provided advance incentives to its new employees in the form of initial settlement support.