Nearly 15 percent of employees in the South Korean construction industry were foreign nationals in the first quarter of this year, amid a shortage of local workers at construction sites, a report showed.

A total of 110,000 workers of foreign nationality were working at construction sites here as of the end of March, accounting for 14.8 percent of the total 741,000 construction workers, according to a quarterly report by the Construction Workers Mutual Aid Association.

The number of foreign construction workers has risen steadily from 77,000 in 2020 to 86,000 in 2021 and 93,000 in 2022, with their portion of the total coming to 12.9 percent, 13.7 percent and 14.1 percent in those years, respectively.

Construction is one of the industrial sectors that relies heavily on foreign workers as locals are becoming increasingly less interested in doing hard manual labor. (Yonhap)