Is North Korean even worse than we imagine?

It's hard for me to imagine a more repressive, stultifying, soul-sucking, terrifying, god-awful society than that of North Korea. And based on a recent reading of a New Yorker article by Ian Urbina on the country's forced labor program, North Korea is even worse than I've imagined.

Which is saying something.

North Korean workers are routinely shipped off to work in Chinese factories where they endure "beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be 'killed without a trace.'” They labor in a range of industries: textiles, seafood processing, construction, software. And there are an estimated 100,000 of them - likely an underestimate - imprisoned in fenced-in dorms, slaving away for next to nothing. Next to nothing for the workers, that is. More than a decade ago, it was estimated that North Korean "earned" as much as $2.3 billion from its Chinese program. Since then, they've expanded and citizens are also farmed out to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.

Not just anyone can get sent out of the country for slave labor. You need to be politically reliable, to lessen the chance of defections. If you have a family member who has defected, no dice. Younger workers must have parents who are still living. If the exported workers tries any funny business, their parents are punished. Another thing: given that North Korea's general population is "chronically malnourished," the general population tends to be short. But North Korea doesn't want to be embarrassed by having short people representing their country, so they look for workers who are over five-feet-one. Then there's a rigorous training/indoctrination process.

Urbina was able to ultra-secrectly survey some of the forced laborers. Here's what they had to say:

Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them. “It was like prison for me,” one woman said. “At first, I almost vomited at how bad it was, and, just when I got used to it, the supervisors would tell us to shut up, and curse if we talked.” Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers. “They would say I’m fuckable and then suddenly grab my body and grope my breasts and put their dirty mouth on mine and be disgusting,” a woman who did product transport at a plant in the city of Dalian said. Another, who worked at Jinhui, said, “The worst and saddest moment was when I was forced to have sexual relations when we were brought to a party with alcohol.” The workers described being kept at the factories against their will, and being threatened with severe punishment if they tried to escape. A woman who was at a factory called Dalian Haiqing Food for more than four years said, “It’s often emphasized that, if you are caught running away, you will be killed without a trace.”

Amazingly:

Jobs in China are coveted in North Korea, because they often come with contracts promising salaries of around two hundred and seventy dollars a month. (Similar work in North Korea pays just three dollars a month.) But the jobs come with hidden costs.

Much of the money is pocketed by intermediaries or reverts to the state. Workers are given a pittance an allowance, and are charged exorbitant rates for food and shelter. Most of their wages are withheld until the end of their contracts, and the workers generally end up with about ten percent of what they were promised. 

Workers usually sign two- or three-year contracts. When they arrive in China, managers confiscate

their passports. Inside the factories, North Korean workers wear different uniforms than Chinese workers. “Without this, we couldn’t tell if one disappeared,” a manager said. Shifts run as long as sixteen hours. If workers attempt to escape, or complain to people outside the plants, their families at home can face reprisals. One seafood worker described how managers cursed at her and flicked cigarette butts. “I felt bad, and I wanted to fight them, but I had to endure,” she said. “That was when I was sad.”

"Benefits" are few. Holidays, sick days? Forget about it. Workers sleep in crowded dorm rooms with dozens of fellow laborers. On the rare times they're let out, surveillance is intense. Mail is censored. 

Given that North Korea is such a rogue state, companies are not supposed to be using North Korean forced labor. There are US and US sanctions, there are regulations, but of course...

One factory Urbina looked into "has exported thousands of tons of fish to companies that supply major U.S. retailers, including Walmart and ShopRite." Not to mention McDonald's, Sysco, and the US military. 

China, by the way, considers approaching workers or snooping around worksites to be espionage. Not to mention that it usually repatriates any defectors back to North Korea, where the best outcome is that they end up in harsh labor camps.

Wherever they're dispatched to, the working conditions are terrible. Workers labor in Russian logging camps, under gulag conditions in freezing weather, without proper clothing. Construction shifts can last from 7:30 a.m. to 3 a.m. 

Impossible to imagine how worse than imaginable North Korea is.