Korea to extend period of stay for seasonal migrant workers to 8 months

Seasonal migrant workers [Photo by MK DB]

The South Korean government will allow foreign seasonal workers to extend their stay from the current five months to eight months to tackle chronic labor shortages in the country’s agricultural and fisheries sectors. The government will also seek to grant long-term residency status to foreigners who have participated in seasonal work here five or more times.

The Ministries of Justice and Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs announced these measures aimed at improving the country’s seasonal worker program for foreigners on Tuesday. The government will revise the relevant enforcement ordinance to increase the employment period for seasonal migrant workers by three months only once. The revised rule will be applied to existing seasonal workers as well as new foreign arrivals, the ministries said.

Maeil Business Newspaper recently raised the need to introduce a separate long-term stay visa for agricultural and fisheries sectors, rather than a one-time improvement of the seasonal worker program, in order to resolve the labor shortage in rural areas, while proposing building a Korean-style immigration society to avoid a demographic cliff and create a more diverse society.

In 2015, the Korean government introduced the seasonal worker program to invite seasonal workers from overseas to legally work in farming and fishing villages on a C-4 visa, which allows a stay of up to 90 days to ease the labor shortage in rural areas, and in 2019, introduced a new type of E-8 visa permitting seasonal migrant workers to stay here for up to five months to deal with the extreme labor shortage during the busy farming season.

In particular, the government’s decision to grant long-term residency status to foreign seasonal workers indicates that the government has accepted criticism that it is only taking stopgap measures by simply expanding the size of foreign workers or extending the period of stay, rather than trying to address the labor shortage problem in a more fundamental fashion. “If foreign seasonal workers work faithfully for more than five years and follow the rules, we can use it as an important factor in allowing them to apply for long-term visas,” said Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon said during a press briefing on Tuesday.