How North Korea pays its bills: a ‘slave’ trade with Russia
VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIA— Across Western Europe and the United States, immigrants from poorer countries, whether plumbers from Poland or farmhands from Mexico, have become a lightning rod for economic anxieties over cheap labour.
The Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, however, has eagerly embraced a new icon of border-crushing globalization: the North Korean painter.
Unlike migrant workers in much of the West, desti- tute decorators from North Korea are so welcome that they have helped make Russia at least the equal of China — Pyongyang’s main backer — as the biggest user of labour from the impoverished yet nuclear-armed country.
Human-rights groups say this statecontrolled traffic amounts to a slave trade, but so desperate are conditions in North Korea that labourers often pay bribes to get sent to Russia, where construction companies and Russians who need work on their homes are delighted to have them.
“They are fast, cheap and very reliable, much better than Russian workers,” Yulia Kravchenko, a Vladivostok housewife said of the painters. “They do nothing but work from morning until late at night.”
The work habits that delight Vladivostok homeowners are also generating sorely needed cash for the world’s most isolated regime, a hereditary dictatorship in Pyongyang now intent on building nu- clear bombs and missiles to carry them as far as the United States.
Squeezed by international sanctions and unable to produce goods that anyone outside North Korea wants to buy — other than missile parts, coal and mushrooms — the government has sent tens of thousands of its impoverished citizens to cities and towns across the former Soviet Union to earn money for the state.
North Korean labourers helped build a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg to be used in next year’s World Cup, a project on which at least one of them died. They are working on a luxury apartment complex in central Moscow, where two North Koreans were found dead last month in a squalid hostel near the construction site. They also cut down trees in remote logging encampments in the Russian Far East that resemble Stalin-era prison camps.
But they have left their biggest and most visible mark in Vladivostok, providing labour to home-repair companies that boast to customers how North Koreans are cheaper, more disciplined and more sober than native Russians.
“Surprisingly, these people are hardworking and orderly. They will not take long rests from work, go on frequent cigarette breaks or shirk their duties,” promised the website of a Vladivostok company.
The home-repair industry stands at the more benign end of North Korea’s labour export program. Painters and plasterers are not generally subjected to the brutal mistreatment endured by North Koreans working in Russian logging camps or in construction.
Though rigidly controlled by minders from the Workers’ Party of Korea, the ruling party in Pyongyang, they do not, on the whole, live in what the State Department in its recently released annual report on human trafficking called “credible reports of slavelike conditions of North Koreans working in Russia.”
All the same, they still suffer from what human rights groups say is a particularly egregious feature of Pyongyang’s labour export program: Most of their earnings are confiscated by the state.
Alengthy report on North Korean workers in Russia issued last year by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, an organization in Seoul, said the Workers’ Party of Korea seizes 80 per cent of the wages earned by forestry workers and at least 30 per cent of the salaries paid to labourers working in construction. Further money is taken to cover living expenses, mandatory contributions to a socalled loyalty fund and other “donations.”
The human-rights group estimated that the North Korean authorities earn at least $120 million (U.S.) a year from labourers sent to Russia, a vital source of income for a family dynasty founded, with Moscow’s backing, by Kim Il Sung in 1948 and now headed by his 33-year-old grandson, Kim Jong Un. It put the number of North Koreans working in Russia at nearly 50,000, though other studies say the number is 30,000 to 40,000, which is still more than in China or the Middle East, the other principal destinations.
The Russian boss of a Vladivostok decorating company that employs scores of North Koreans said the amount of money seized from salaries had increased substantially over the past decade, rising to a current monthly rate of 50,000 rubles, or $841, from17,000 rubles a month in 2006. He said his highest-paid workers now lose half or more of their monthly salary through confiscation, while the leader of each construction squad of around 20 to 30 labourers takes an additional cut of about 20 per cent in return for finding painting jobs for his men.
The Russian asked that he not be named because he feared that Workers’ Party supervisors would punish his labourers or prevent them from working with him.
The increased rate of confiscation followed a sharp fall in the value of the ruble against the dollar, a troubling development for a regime that wants dollars.
But the jacking up of the amount of rubles seized more than compensated for the ruble’s fall, reflecting Pyongyang’s desperate hunt for more cash since Kim Jong Un took power in December 2011 and ramped up North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.
International sanctions and a Chinese ban on imports of North Korean coal in February after a series of missile tests have steadily squeezed Pyongyang’s other sources of foreign revenue. That has left the export of labour, along with a string of state-run restaurants and other small businesses in Vladivostok and elsewhere, as one of the regime’s shrinking list of ways to generate hard currency.
The Russian boss said North Koreans work “crazily long hours” without complaint and call him at 6 a.m., even on weekends, if he has not yet shown up to tell them what to paint or plaster. “They don’t take holidays. They eat, work and sleep and nothing else. And they don’t sleep much,” he said. “They are basically in the situation of slaves.”
All the same, he added, North Koreans still want to work in Russia, where, despite the hardships and confiscation of a big chunk of their wages, they can live better and freer than they do at home.