After nuclear test, a new push to stop North Korea sending workers abroad

SEOUL, South Korea – As the international community looks for new ways to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test, one area is emerging as the next front to apply pressure: North Korea’s practice of sending workers overseas to earn money for the regime.

The United States and South Korea had already started quietly trying to persuade host countries to stop allowing in North Korean guest workers, according to people who work in both governments. That drive is likely to accelerate now that North Korea has shown that new sanctions imposed this year have failed to dissuade it from pursuing nuclear weapons.

“There’s going to be a global shaming campaign,” said Andrei Lankov, an expert on North Korea at Kookmin University in Seoul, citing conversations with officials.

In the five years since Kim Jong Un took over, North Korea has dramatically stepped up the number of people it sends abroad to earn hard currency.

At least 50,000 North Koreans – and by some estimates, double that – are working in more than two dozen foreign countries. The vast majority, about 80 percent, are in China and Russia, toiling in garment factories and on construction sites, or felling trees in Siberian forests.

The North Koreans are sent abroad usually for three years and are still tightly controlled outside the totalitarian country.

At one garment factory in northern China, visited by a Washington Post reporter last year, North Korean women lived in small dormitories inside the factory and were allowed to go out to the market only once a week and only in small groups – so they could keep an eye on one another.

While they’re abroad, the North Koreans are allowed to keep one-third of their earnings – out of their monthly $300 salary for the seamstresses in China – and the rest goes to the regime. The Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights estimates that the Kim regime now earns $300 million a year this way.

Given that North Korea’s main exports – mineral resources like coal and iron ore – were explicitly banned under U.N. sanctions imposed in March following the previous nuclear test, analysts expect Pyongyang to become increasingly reliant on labor to generate hard currency.

“We have raised with some governments our concerns about the use of (North Korean) workers in their countries, and consequently some governments have modified their policies,” the State Department said in a report sent to Congress late last month.