Worker sanction set to hurt Pyongyang
North Korea stands to lose a rare legitimate source of foreign currency, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, if nations that employ its people as guest workers abide by a UN order to send them all home by this weekend.
Sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council in December 2017 after North Korea tested a longrange missile required member states to repatriate all North Korean workers from their territories within 24 months, a deadline that arrives on Sunday.
There are no UN penalties for not following through, however, and it appears unlikely that there will be a mass exodus of the thousands of workers still believed employed in places like China and Russia.
But if even half of North Korean workers were sent back home, North Korea would still suffer financially, said analyst Oh Gyeong-seob at Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification.
In China, Russia and elsewhere, there is strong demand for cheap North Korean workers. The US State Department previously estimated there were about 100,000 North Korean workers worldwide, and civilian experts said those workers brought North Korea an estimated US$200 million (NZ$302m) to US$500 million in revenue a year.
North Korean workers abroad are under the constant surveillance of their country’s security agents, toil more than 12 hours a day and take home only a fraction of their salaries, with the rest going to their government. Human rights organisations have called them modern-day slaves, but their jobs are highly coveted in North Korea.
According to interim reports that member states submitted to the UN, 23,245 North Korean workers have so far been repatriated.
The estimate for the number of North Koreans working in China has been as high as 50,000 to 80,000, with the vast majority working in factories in the country’s northeast along the long border with North Korea.
Lim Soo-ho, a sanctions expert at Seoul’s Institute for National Security Strategy, said Beijing would find it difficult to persuade local governments in the region to send those workers home as their special economic zones mainly rely on North Korean labour. Lim said he has seen no signs that the number of North Korean workers in northeastern China was decreasing.