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 U.N. order to send them all home by this weekend.
In this Dec. 5, 2019, photo, North Korean factory workers head to work before dawn in Dandong, a Chinese city on the border with North Korea. A U.N.-set deadline for member states to repatriate all North Korean workers on their soils falls on Sunday, Dec. 22. 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 the country's northeast along the long border with North Korea.
There are no U.N. 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. 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 organizations have called them modern-day slaves, but their jobs are highly coveted in North Korea.
Lim said he has seen no signs that the number of North Korean workers in northeastern China was decreasing. A Russian interim report said the number of North Koreans with valid work permits in the country decreased to 11,490 in late 2018 from 30,023 a year earlier. Public records show the Labor Ministry hasn’t issued a single work authorization for North Korean workers this year.
Qatar told the U.N. in March that there were only 70 North Koreans working in the country, down from about 2,500 in January 2016. Most of the North Koreans had been working in construction, though Qatar has said none of them had ever worked on construction sites related to the 2022 World Cup.
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