North Korean workers exploited abroad to pay Pyongyang's bills

As the fierce Arabian sun beat down on the construction site in the summer of 2012, pushing the temperature beyond the thermometer's upper limit of 50C, the site supervisor began to fear for the safety of his fellow North Korean workers.

"It's too hot - let's stop working," he urged his manager, noting that south Asian labourers at nearby sites had taken shelter from the unusually strong midday heat. The suggestion was rejected immediately. "How dare you try that," he was told.

The man - who, like others interviewed for this article, asked the Financial Times to withhold his name and some details of his story to protect family in North Korea - had travelled to the Gulf as one of a growing number of labourers sent abroad by Pyongyang in recent years to raise foreign currency for the regime.

While North Korea has despatched workers to other countries - principally Russia - for decades, researchers say the numbers appear to be increasing as international sanctions limit the regime's ability to profit from arms sales and other illicit trade.

"We estimate there are about 100,000 North Korean workers in 40 countries all over the world," says Ahn Myeong-chul, a former prison camp guard who leads NK Watch, a non-profit group. "We think the number has doubled since 2012 - with a huge increase in workers going to China."

Estimates of the number of workers vary widely, with researchers forced to extrapolate from the impressions of current or former labourers. So do assessments of the amount of money the regime receives from the work - one 2012 estimate, from the North Korea Strategy Center, a Seoul-based human rights group, put it at between $1.5bn and $2.3bn a year.

Whatever the figures, extensive testimonies indicate a web of operations with huge scope across regions and sectors: Pyongyang has sent workers to make shoes in the Czech Republic; build monuments in Senegal; grow soya beans in China; mine coal in Malaysia; and serve meals in the network of North Korean-owned restaurants that stretches from Ulan Bator to Amsterdam.

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Other workers interviewed by the FT and researchers describe harsh, sometimes dangerous conditions. "The people cutting the trees were always fearing for their lives - they did not have proper safety equipment," says a North Korean who worked for two years at a timber site in Amur, eastern Russia.

During the winter logging season, working hours were from 8am until "sometimes 2am or 3am" in temperatures that could fall below minus 40C, he says.

Despite such hardships, the chance to work abroad is highly prized by some North Koreans, who often pay bribes for what they see as the opportunity to make money. This is a reflection of the pitiful rewards available to most workers at home, where the typical monthly salary is worth less than $1 at black market exchange rates.

"The selection process for the workers is quite competitive - those chosen have to be deemed loyal to the regime," Mr Ahn says. "But they tend to have high expectations and the reality is that they do not make much money."

< > Current and former North Korean overseas workers describe how the vast majority of their nominal wage is lost to management fees and contributions to the ruling Korean Workers' Party. Their testimonies suggest a common system where managers agree to send a set monthly sum back to North Korea. If funds are short, the workers may be denied their wages or made to contribute to the remittance.

Yet workers can still earn $1,000 for a year's work - a significant sum in North Korea, where most rely on the black market for sustenance and where bribery can be a crucial means of obtaining professional or other opportunities, such as securing education for their children. "The bribes to get into a good university are expensive - Kim Il Sung University is about $10,000," says one former overseas worker.

<>Others aim for a place on Pyongyang's property ladder. One North Korean who spoke to the FT was able to buy an apartment - with electricity sometimes at night and hot water only in winter - in 2000, after returning with $5,500 from five years in Malaysia, where he worked on infrastructure projects for companies including local conglomerate Country Heights.

Conditions in Malaysia were better than those encountered by North Korean labourers elsewhere, says the worker, who returned for a second stint in 2005-2010. "We were able to watch South Korean and Malaysian TV shows and the managers said we could skip our political education sessions," he says.

Teodora Gyupchanova, author of a report on the subject for the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, says: "Compared with life in North Korea, working overseas could be considered a privilege."

But she notes that the exploitative conditions faced by the workers fall far short of international standards and urges action from the host nations - most of which, unlike North Korea, are members of the International Labour Organization, a UN agency.

Instead of addressing improper working conditions, she says, authorities in the host countries usually care only about workers' immigration status. "It's difficult for us to accept that the host countries have no knowledge of the situation," she says.

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