by Andrea Ferrario

Informal employment is exploding in North Korea because of a drop in orders from China and lower wages. Tensions are also rising among the workers Kim supplies to China, fuelled by ever-increasing deductions from their wages to ensure revenue for the North Korean regime. Meanwhile, Russia has become North Korea’s new El Dorado, at a cost of extensive linguistic and cultural isolation for workers.

Milan (AsiaNews) – When it comes to North Korean workers, the conversation typically oscillates between two equally distorted extremes: complete indifference vs helpless cogs.

The reality that emerges from available information is different, more layered and tragic precisely because it is riddled with real tensions and forms of resistance that challenge the caricature of automatic passivity.

Work at home

Within North Korea, official employment has long since ceased to guarantee subsistence.

State salaries hover around four to six dollars a month, while the price of rice has doubled since 2020, reaching nearly 6,000 North Korean won per kilo (equal to about 30-40 US cents).

Wages have become an administrative fiction. Survival depends on informal work and ad hoc jobs.

Over the past two years, precariousness has been exacerbated by the collapse of subcontracting orders from China.

Automation in Chinese factories making embroidery, wigs, and false eyelashes, North Korea’s traditional exports, has eliminated one of the main sources of income for North Korean families.

In their place, casual work has exploded, including odd jobs in construction and seasonal employment in agriculture, often paid in kind rather than money.

The socialist rhetoric of state-assigned labour coexists with a reality of daily expedients to find food and fuel.

Meanwhile, the regime has responded to the economic crisis by boosting ideological control on the workplace. All workers must participate in weekly sessions to study party directives.

Activity and campaigns for major projects, formally voluntary, are in fact mandatory, and those who fail to participate risk losing food rations, when available.

In several provinces, especially in the northeast, the government tried to impose overtime to make up for production shortfalls.

In Hyesan, the order was rescinded after informal protests broke out and work performance declined, a sign of growing tensions between the regime's objectives and the capabilities of a worn-out population.

Work in North Korea is no longer a tool for redistribution, if it ever was. It is a means of social control that runs up against an increasingly insecure material reality, with the system showing cracks.

The Chinese case

This pattern of converging pressures partly explains what's happening across the border. For decades, sending workers to China provided North Korea with an economic and political lifeline, but over the past two years, the mechanism has started to break down on both sides.

In October 2024, some 4,000 North Korean workers were repatriated from the Chinese city of Dandong in a single month; although the flow of workers continued, it was at a reduced rate in the months that followed.

Chinese authorities have primarily targeted small factories with fewer than 200 employees, active in clothing and electronics assembly.

At the same time, large-scale deportations for minor administrative infractions have multiplied, amid disciplinary rigidity bordering on slavery; for example, unauthorised leave or possession of items to be sent home are sufficient grounds for deportation.

For the workers who remain, conditions have deteriorated quickly. Shifts can reach up to 13 hours without paid overtime, and in some factories, the only bonus consists of additional rations.

The most serious issue, however, remains wages. Initial promises of 2,000 yuan per month turned out to be payments ranging between 300 and 700 yuan. The remainder is withheld by North Korean officials who manage the accounts into which salaries are paid, net of the "quotas" in currency earmarked for the state.

These quotas can reach up to 70 per cent of income and, as of 10 March 2025, were doubled by decree by Pyongyang. In mid-March 2025, accumulated discontent erupted at a fish processing plant in Dalian.

North Korean workers received a rare five-day leave, likely seen by officials as sufficient concession to ease tensions, but when they asked for access to their savings, they were flatly refused.

The dispute quickly escalated. The intervention of local citizens averted further damage, and managers then distributed minimal sums while enforcing silence.

This is not an isolated incident. Already in January 2024, in the Chinese city of Jilin, North Korean workers exasperated by unpaid wages attacked a supervisor, who died of his injuries.

Today, China represents the paradox of a place of opportunity that morphed into a cage.

Chinese authorities actively collaborate in the disciplinary control of North Korean workers, while Chinese factories are actively automating production, eliminating the very subcontracting orders that have been for years the raison d'être of the entire system.

Workers thus find themselves trapped between two mechanisms of power that converge to make them redundant, with increasingly bleak prospects.

Russia as a new front

While China closes employment channels and intensifies repatriations, Russia is opening up, offering new opportunities to North Korean workers. Between 2024 and early 2025, thousands of workers travelled to the Russian Federation, to work primarily in construction and Siberian logging.

Their number remains uncertain, ranging from a few thousands to tens of thousands depending on the source.

Regarding wages, South Korean studies estimate average gross compensation of about US$ 800 per month, although only a fraction of this actually reaches workers.

The mechanism for circumventing UN sanctions prohibiting the "export" of North Korean workers is well tested, consisting of student visas or formal cover-ups that mask actual employment contracts.

Some journalistic investigations report placements even in large Russian distribution and logistics companies, a sign that the scope of employment is expanding.

Pyongyang has also begun negotiations to send healthcare workers, as part of a broader partnership that includes the construction of a hospital and medical training programmes.

In Russia, as in China, the North Korean government has imposed a significant increase in the foreign currency quota that workers must pay to the state on a monthly basis. In Sakhalin, for example, the amount required of each worker has doubled, from 62,000 to approximately 124,000 roubles.

Since Russian companies pay their total wages directly to Pyongyang's representatives, the doubling of the quota translates into a drastic reduction in the amount of money actually available for workers.

To maintain the level of remittances sent home, many are forced to work longer hours or take on additional assignments, with their savings dwindling under increasingly harsh material conditions.

The model of exploitation reproduces the one already operating in China, but in a more isolated environment and less subject to international scrutiny, thanks to the political cover provided by the strategic partnership between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Russia represents the North Korean regime's new El Dorado. For workers, it simply means the reproduction of the system of exploitation in a different environment, with the same constraints and pressures, compounded by greater geographical distance and linguistic and cultural isolation.

The North Korean labour system is based on an increasingly precarious balance between currency extraction, ideological control, and workers' capacity for resistance.

The conflicts in Dalian and Jilin demonstrate that even in a totalitarian regime, there is room for protest. In these acts of resistance, we glimpse a desire for autonomy that shatters the image of workers as passive automatons.

• north korea
• china
• russia
• workers
• exploitation
• resistance