ways of combating the country’s exports of labor to Russia, China and Middle East countries especially Qatar, and a range of other countries in southern Europe, Africa and parts of Asia.
While the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) classifies exported labor from North Korea as close to slave labor, research reports affirm that people in North Korea often bribe officials to get a chance to be sent abroad as a laborer. Yet most of their supposed wages end up elsewhere.
A current release of the World Human Trafficking Report of the United States Department of State for 2017 issued early this month and relying on auxiliary agencies like the Seoul-based Data Base Center for North Korea Human Rights estimates that about 50,000 North Korean laborers are working in low-paying jobs in Russia.
It says that they enable authorities in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang to net about $120million annually, as the regime maintains strict controls over the workers’ wages.
Experts differ as to how much of the formal pay the laborers actually get. Figures show it is about 30 per cent, but verbal assertions are different.
Scott Snyder, director of the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council of Foreign Relations said in a recent interview that North Korean labor exports is an issue that has been going on under the radar for a long time.
Still the researcher is not in a position to say how it ought to be ended, as it depends on other countries to take that initiative, and they would rather maintain the flow of cheap labor for huge infrastructure projects like holding the FIFA World Cup finals in the Gulf in 2022, logging in the Russian Far East, and scores of other activities.
The US has often raised the potential for sanctions against firms using North Korean labor exports, timidly.
Some key construction projects in Russia in which North Korean labor has been involved to a considerable extent or wholly depended on such labor includes a new soccer stadium in St Petersburg and a new apartment complex in Moscow.
While the UN has been passing sharp resolutions slapping trade sanctions against North Korea, US news agencies reported early this month that Chinese trade with North Korea jumped more than 10 per cent in the first half of this year, a situation that mirrors Russian use of North Korean labor exports.
This notwithstanding that North Korean worker in Russia face conditions that UN agencies routinely term as slavery.
Some of the data that appeared in the Seoul-based North Korea Human Rights data centre affirm that North Korean workers toil under extremely harsh conditions, where analysts declare that the sort of conditions that North Korean workers face in Russian logging camps in the Siberia zone (in the Russian Far East, an extremely cold zone) “brought to mind the brutal Soviet-era Gulag system.”
The system of forced labor that characterized primitive socialism in Russia before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and especially before the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, in 1956.
Still the researchers point out that many North Koreans bribe officials so as to be sent to Russia as the situation at home is worse economically than the situation that its exported laborers face abroad.
In the 2017 World Human Trafficking Report, the US State Department says that North Korean workers in Russia “had been subjected to exploitative labor conditions characteristic of trafficking cases such as withholding of identity documents, non-payment for services rendered, physical abuse, lack of safety measures, or extremely poor living conditions.”
Yet there are sharp distinctions that most victims of trafficking are put into the hands of criminal gangs when they seek to migrate, whereas exported labor from North Korea isn’t a case of illegal migration.
Nor are their wages confiscated by criminal gangs who confiscate identity documents which makes a laborer incapable of seeking justice, as in the case of North Koreans it is a formal arrangement.
Data on what the workers earn directly and the portion that is confiscated for being sent back to the state authorities in Pyongyang and segments of wages held back by taskmasters supervising North Korean exported labor also differs.
A few direct assertions by experts cited by some US news outlets as well as the Seoul data centre suggest that up to 90 per cent of wages is taken away for the two purposes, but other figures indicate a different division, apportioning.
The New York Times is for instance quoted in a Fox News report what the boss of a decorating company in Vladivostock (in the Russian Far East) said of the wages.
“Minders from the Workers’ Party of Korea, the ruling party in Pyongyang, will confiscate half or more of a laborer’s monthly salary and the construction crew boss will take another 20 per cent.” It means ratios aren’t fixed.
Pyongyang can limit claims on laborers’ wages to 50 per cent or take up more, and construction crew boss (for himself and associates, that is, those who spy on the workers while pretending to be workers like themselves but are party members or acknowledged acolytes of the crew boss) may take just around 20 per cent, which leaves 30 per cent for the laborers.
But in a lawless environment if Pyongyang hasn’t levied for more than 50 per cent bosses may take more. That is why the pay for a laborer is variable but minimal; never 30 per cent of proceeds, as experts say up to 90 per cent of the proceeds are taken away.
The Pyongyang authorities earn increasingly large sums of money from this source because wages rose from 17,000 rubles ($283) to 50,000 rubles or $841, but workers’ pay has not risen during the decade. They eat, work and sleep, a bit.
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