“Are the names of your foreign colleagues hard to pronounce? Then just call them by their nicknames.”

Jeon Jun-bong, an executive director working at Geumhwa Tech in the Maegok Industrial Complex in Ulsan, said this. A total of nine migrant workers are employed here. At the company, they are addressed by nicknames such as ‘Dihasu’ and ‘Kong’. These are not arbitrary nicknames made up by the company. They are the nicknames the migrant workers used back home with family and relatives.

Jeon said, “There are places where people call migrant workers ‘ya’ and ‘inma’ like that, but I do not think that is right,” adding, “Calling people by name builds closeness among colleagues and makes the company atmosphere better.”

The ‘Call Migrant Workers by Their Names’ project to protect migrant workers’ human rights is being expanded nationwide. On the 16th, the Public Coexistence Solidarity Fund, the Financial Industry Public Interest Foundation, the Office and Finance Ubuntu Foundation, and the Jeon Tae-il Foundation announced, “We plan to expand nationwide, together with the Ministry of Employment and Labor, a project that last year was carried out as a campaign at some workplaces in South Jeolla, Ulsan, and elsewhere.” These groups will sign a business agreement on the 17th to move the project forward.

The project began out of concern that on worksites migrant workers are often called by impersonal terms instead of their names, which can ultimately lead to human rights violations. In the National Human Rights Commission’s 2024 “Study to Analyze the Causes of Migrant Worker Deaths and Establish a Support System,” migrant workers testified to experiences of human rights violations such as, “We have no names. We are called ya, or this XX,” and “In Korean culture they say ‘ya’, but we take such forms of address as mistreatment.”

Ko Jeong-eun, head of occupational safety and health at the Ulsan Northern Irregular Workers Support Center, said, “Because people are not familiar with migrant workers’ names, it seems they sometimes substitute the country instead,” adding, “There are many migrant workers who are called by country names such as ‘Hey, Vietnam’ or ‘Hey, Myanmar’.”

The name-calling project will proceed in three stages. Stage 1 is to provide 5,000 safety helmets to migrant workers and affix stickers with each worker’s name. These helmets will be distributed mainly to large worksites with many migrant workers, such as construction sites and shipyards. Stage 2 will provide winter clothing to migrant workers who frequently work outdoors. Stage 3 includes providing forks to migrant workers who may be unfamiliar with using chopsticks and posting restaurant menus translated into their languages.

From the 27th, the Ministry of Employment and Labor and others are recruiting companies in industrial complexes in the Ulsan area to participate as the project is scaled up in earnest. Going forward, the plan is to gradually expand the project, focusing on areas with many migrant workers, such as Gimhae in South Gyeongsang Province and Ansan in Gyeonggi Province.

Moon Gil-ju, the general project director, said, “We must not forget that in the 1970s and 1980s, Koreans also went abroad to earn money and worked as foreign laborers,” adding, “Calling people by name is the starting point for protecting the human rights of migrant workers.”