rex

In 2014, the human resources team at Korean Air kept a file on all the new trainees hired through the company's Manila office. They had evaluation forms for each one, with ratings for their English, fruit prep, vegetable prep, and ironing. The recruits weren't actually learning to work for an airline. They were Filipina domestic workers, and the training program was a cover the Cho family, which owns Korean Air, used to get them into the country. The orders came from Lee Myung-hee, the chairman's wife (she does not hold a position at Korean Air). Her daughter is Cho Hyun-ah, the executive who once had a plane turned around because she was upset about how her macadamia nuts had been served. At the time, foreigners could not legally work as domestic help in South Korea unless they were ethnically Korean or married to a Korean citizen. So the Manila office hired the women on paper, marked them as "outstanding," and flew them to Korea as trainees. They were never trained. We know this is how it went because the employees leaked the emails. In one exchange, the chairman's office passes on his wife's complaint that the new trainee got an average grade in fruit and vegetable preparation but can actually do nothing of the sort, and that one should immediately find someone else who can work in the kitchen. In another exchange, a woman is getting sent home. Put her on the 7:55 a.m. flight to Manila, and send a company car to pick her up from the house at 5:30. In 2019, the mother and the daughter were convicted of illegally employing 11 Filipinas in their two households. They got suspended sentences and did not go to jail. In court, the wife apologized to the airline employees who had carried out her orders. She never mentioned the Filipinas. Five years later, Korea legalized a version of the scheme that the family had carried out illegally. In 2024, the government imported a hundred Filipina housekeepers on real work visas and paid minimum wage. When the labor ministry looked into the households that hired them, it discovered that 90% of them had incomes of more than about $4,200 a month, and the largest share of them lived in Gangnam, Seoul's richest district. The demand that the Cho family had broken the law to meet was real, and never unique to them. But even when the government legalized it, most of the people who could afford it were families like them.