The country’s conditions are so desperate, labourers are paying bribes to get sent to Russia.
VLADIVOSTOK, RUSSIA—Across Western Europe and the United States, immigrants from poorer countries, whether plumbers from Poland or farmhands from Mexico, have become a lightning rod for economic anxieties over cheap labour.
The Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, however, has eagerly embraced a new icon of border-crushing globalization: the North Korean painter.
Unlike migrant workers in much of the West, destitute decorators from North Korea are so welcome that they have helped make Russia at least the equal of China — Pyongyang’s main backer — as the world’s biggest user of labour from the impoverished yet nuclear-armed country.
Human rights groups say this state-controlled traffic amounts to a slave trade, but so desperate are conditions in North Korea that labourers often pay bribes to get sent to Russia, where construction companies and Russians who need work on their homes are delighted to have them.
“They are fast, cheap and very reliable, much better than Russian workers, ” Yulia Kravchenko, a 32-year-old Vladivostok housewife said of the painters. “They do nothing but work from morning until late at night.”
The work habits that delight Vladivostok homeowners are also generating sorely needed cash for the world’s most isolated regime, a hereditary dictatorship in Pyongyang now intent on building nuclear bombs and missiles to carry them as far as the United States.
Squeezed by international sanctions and unable to produce goods that anyone outside North Korea wants to buy — other than missile parts, coal and mushrooms — the government has sent tens of thousands of its impoverished citizens to cities and towns across the former Soviet Union to earn money for the state.
North Korean labourers helped build a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg to be used in next year’s World Cup, a project on which at least one of them died. They are working on a luxury apartment complex in central Moscow, where two North Koreans were found dead last month in a squalid hostel near the construction site. They also cut down trees in remote logging encampments in the Russian Far East that resemble Stalin-era prison camps.
But they have left their biggest and most visible mark in Vladivostok, providing labour to home-repair companies that boast to customers how North Koreans are cheaper, more disciplined and more sober than native Russians.
