North Koreans For Sale

Parties like the New Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) claim that there's something socialist about North Korea. We have always challenged that idea. 

 Pyonyang regime “leases” 50,000 people throughout the world for a very low price to both private and public enterprises, according to information revealed by the Database on Human Rights Violations in North Korea (NKDB). North Koreans seconded to work all over the world are often labourers, but their slave-like conditions apply equally to doctors, computer programmers and military personnel. The North Korean workers’ contracts with foreign enterprises systematically go through the Pyongyang regime’s intermediaries, explained Yeo-sang Yoon, director of the NKDB.

Many are in Russia (20,000) and China (19,000) – in other words countries where labour legislation is weak and conditions are difficult. There are 2,000 North Koreans in Mongolia, 1,800 in Qatar and 300 in Malaysia. Even more shocking is the fact that one host country to 800 workers is Poland, an EU member. Willy Fautré, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF), points out that this is not the first time Poland has been criticised for practices of this kind. As early as 2006, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that North Korean workers were being employed at the Gdansk naval shipyards.

“The authorities then announced that they had stopped hiring North Korean workers, but a few years later there was a new case, also revealed by Gazeta Wyborcza, about a Polish-North Korean association that brought in young people as “trainees”. They worked in the orchards, among other things. Apparently quite a few enterprises have taken up this practice again while the Polish government turns a blind eye,” says Fautré. He notes that other EU countries have also been singled out by his organisation, notably the Netherlands, where a restaurant in Amsterdam employed North Korean staff in dubious conditions.

An interviewee recalls the conditions he experienced for three years “in a Middle Eastern country” that he refuses to identify, working in the construction industry. “We worked up to 16 hours a day for a salary of US$150, from which housing costs and charges were deducted. In reality we received US$80 at best. There was no medical insurance, and if we fell ill that was also deducted from our pay.”

The men were billeted seven to a room only ten metres square and infested with cockroaches and rats, with no heating or air conditioning.

What that means in practical terms is that 90 per cent of the workers’ pay is deducted by the government. That's worse than the government here deducts from prisoners allowed out to work outside during the day before the end of their sentence. The Prisoners' Earnings Act 1996 only allow “the prison Governor to take a deduction of 40% from an offender's weekly/monthly earnings over £20.”

But then workers in North Korea are treated more or less like prisoners. Workers are strongly advised against, or simply forbidden from, communicating with the outside world, and the regime sends its agents to constantly watch their every move. Their passports and visas are also confiscated. Another interviewee said that a bank account had been opened in his name, yet he had never been told about it and never had access to it.

So, what has happened is North Korea have nationalised the workforce, and used them to get foreign currency from trade. How dare the New Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (M-L) accept North Korean subsidies to maintain their organisations. They are profiting from the sweat and toil of the state-slaves.