... The lack of interpreters has sometimes led to discrimination in industrial accident claims. As of July 2013, the approval rate for occupational disease claims was 61.23% for South Korean workers, but just 28.97% for migrant workers. Lawmaker Chang Ha-na of the Democratic Party (now the New Politics Alliance for Democracy) suggested at the time that the situation might have something to do with the lack of any interpreters on the Korea Workers‘ Compensation and Welfare Service staff. “When a migrant worker who has an occupational disease is unable to speak Korean well, it becomes tremendously difficult to prove that overwork or workplace conditions are responsible for the disease without the services of an interpreter,” Chang said last year. Meanwhile, many migrant workers have complained of difficulties asserting their rights without interpreting services. An Amnesty International report titled “Bitter Harvest: Exploitation and Forced Labour of Migrant Agricultural Workers in South Korea,” quoted a 25-year-old from Vietnam identified as “EN” as saying he had been victimized as a result of job center discussions conducted entirely in Korean without an interpreter. ... Another common complaint is that the interpreters tend to take the employer’s side. “The interpreter at the job center was a fellow Cambodian, but while they gave detailed explanations of the things my boss said, they gave only short explanations for what I said,” recalled a 25-year-old Cambodian woman identified by the initial “P.” “I asked the interpreter, and they said if it turned into too much of a problem, the Korean bosses wouldn‘t hire Cambodian workers anymore, and then there wouldn’t be as many people coming from Cambodia,” P added. “They said I should just put up with it.”