Thursday, October 16, 2003
INTERESTING STORY ON THE CONTINUING USE OF NORTH KOREAN LABOR IN RUSSIA.
But since a series of natural disasters devastated North Korea's economy in the 1990s, its state firms have also started signing contracts to provide Russian construction companies with cheap labor in exchange for hard cash.
"Nowadays, they prefer money," says Alexei Starichkov, a Korea expert at the Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok. "Russians use them for the hard and dirty work. The quality of the work is not so high, but people prefer them because they are cheap."
The North Koreans usually stay in dormitories, supervised by their own plainclothes security agents, experts say.
Some work in teams on big construction projects, but others are sent out to find smaller jobs, such as decorating apartments, for themselves.
Once a week, they have to attend a meeting to report on their activities and hand over the bulk of their earnings.
Conditions in the dormitories are poor. Many workers, like Kim, prefer to stay in the apartments they are working on. But back home in North Korea, which depends on international aid to feed its people, competition is fierce to join the Russian work teams, experts say. Some workers even bribe government officials to get a place on a team.
