North Korea is preparing to send up to 28,000 more workers overseas. Recruitment efforts that began last year have entered the selection phase as Pyongyang seeks to boost foreign currency earnings by exploiting gaps in international sanctions.
The latest deployment will send workers to more than 10 countries, with Russia receiving the vast majority, a Daily NK source in North Korea said recently. Russia will get 24,200 workers, while China gets 1,500, Southeast Asia receives 700, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates get 800, Libya receives 600 and Iran gets 130.
Defector families excluded from deployment
Quotas have been assigned to each province, including Pyongyang, with preference given to skilled workers and veterans who have been sent abroad more than twice.
About 5,000 workers selected in the first round are awaiting final interviews, while an additional 3,000 undergoing selection have begun physical screenings, ID checks and document reviews, the source said.
Selection criteria include technical skills, organizational activity records, evaluation papers, recommendations, ideological leanings and health status. Applicants with defectors in their families are excluded, as are those with liver, nervous or infectious diseases and those suspected of malnutrition due to being severely underweight.
Bribes still influence the selection process. “You still need to pay money to the guidance officer or officials at your workplace or district to get selected,” the source said. “Officials only take bribes in dollars or Chinese yuan, and generally speaking, bribes have doubled or tripled from past years.”
But this system ultimately harms workers. Those who pay bribes feel they need to “get their money’s worth” for being sent abroad, creating psychological pressure that leads to forced labor conditions.
Even when workers endure long hours of difficult labor abroad, most of their wages don’t reach them. The state takes the majority, leaving workers with only small amounts.
“Workers’ wages go to strengthening the party’s finances and state-planned construction projects by ministry, committee, workplace or region,” the source said. “Workers dispatched overseas are a major cash cow for running the economy.”
China and Russia open the gates
North Korea’s large-scale worker deployment overseas has political backing from China and Russia. Both countries have expressed support for lifting sanctions on Pyongyang through summit meetings, and North Korea is using this momentum to justify expanding worker dispatches.
“Chinese and Russian support for easing sanctions on the North has justified Pyongyang’s claim that dispatching workers is a ‘just sovereign act,’” the source said.
“In some Chinese regions, authorities may make it easier for North Korean workers to live there or expand the number they accept, while Russia makes it even clearer that it needs North Korean personnel for post-war reconstruction, building in the Far East and resolving labor shortages.”
Chinese and Russian calls to lift sanctions aren’t just diplomatic rhetoric. They appear based on strategic calculations to expand regional influence and contain the United States.
“They align with the political understanding that the parties must help each other when they’re down and expand the anti-imperialist front,” the source said. “Expanding worker dispatches is understood even in China and Russia as ‘buffered economic cooperation.’”
North Korea’s efforts to send workers overseas is a systematic attempt to undermine international sanctions, which could render those sanctions powerless and create space to hide forced labor by disguising it as “legal economic cooperation.”
Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, told Daily NK that Russia “faces serious manpower shortages due to the war’s length” and that labor gaps have emerged “across all industries with the sacrifice of many people on the battlefield, including young soldiers.” Russia accepts North Korean labor “as an urgent means to fill the vacuum.
“Large-scale dispatch of North Korean workers is beginning in earnest as a result of shared interests between North Korea and Russia and mutual bilateral demand,” Lim continued, adding: “This is seen as a move to maximize practical benefits by dispatching labor as an extension of wartime cooperation.”
North’s theatrical response to international criticism
The international community has long criticized human rights violations in North Korea’s overseas worker program, including forced labor. The International Labour Organization, U.N. Human Rights Council and other international bodies have raised concerns about poor working conditions, involuntary dispatches and wage exploitation.
But North Korea flatly denies international criticism, consistently calling it dishonest. “Officially, North Korea has responded by calling the criticism malicious fabrications,” the source said.
“The government has ordered improvements in work conditions and recently emphasized this in lectures for managing officials,” the source said. However, it remains doubtful whether conditions for workers sent overseas will actually improve.
Daily NK reported in April that North Korean workers sent to seafood processing plants in China must continue working even after serious injuries and can’t receive proper treatment.
North Korea has responded with what amounts to theater. “Authorities plan to reveal minor contract adjustments, including guaranteed rest days and allowing partial wage payments to individuals in-country, while making workers keep the content strictly secret,” the source said. “They want to prepare evidence to respond to criticism by international agencies.”
In other words, regardless of whether working conditions have actually improved, authorities want to avoid international criticism by preparing documents that make it appear things have gotten better.
Lim said North Korea was “avoiding the international community’s attention through formalistic mechanisms rather than trying to break through sanctions head-on.” He said continuously tracking and criticizing North Korea’s labor dispatches “was the international community’s only way to respond when stopping the labor dispatches diplomatically was impossible since the U.N. Security Council has lost its ability to put substantive sanctions on the North.”
Lim stressed the need for the international community to send a clear message to Russia. “Rather than directly sanctioning North Korea, generating negative opinion against Russia and pressuring Moscow could be more effective, while the international community’s voice could be a variable that Russia would partially consider.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: dailynk.com
