A survey finds that nine out of ten small- and mid-sized enterprises(SMEs) that have hired foreign employees did so because they could not find domestic workers.

The Korea Federation of SMEs in November surveyed one-thousand such companies in the manufacturing sector that employed non-Korean workers and found that the main reason for hiring foreigners, at 90-point-six percent, was difficulty in finding local workers.

When hiring foreign workers, the firms responded that the country of origin was taken into consideration first at nearly 40 percent, followed by Korean language proficiency, physical condition and then skills.

The average cost of labor per foreign worker last year was two-point-six million won a month, or around 21-hundred U.S. dollars, some 94 percent of the cost for South Korean nationals.

When asked about the limit of nine years and eight months for foreign workers, 81 percent of SMEs responded in favor of extending it.

As for desired changes to the employment permit system, the companies most urgently hoped for sanction mechanisms against foreign workers who were unreliable and frequently changed workplaces.

Source: KBS World Radio