North Korea is preparing to send up to 28,000 more workers overseas. Recruitment efforts that began last year have entered the selection phase as Pyongyang seeks to boost foreign currency earnings by exploiting gaps in international sanctions.
The latest deployment will send workers to more than 10 countries, with Russia receiving the vast majority, a Daily NK source in North Korea said recently. Russia will get 24,200 workers, while China gets 1,500, Southeast Asia receives 700, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates get 800, Libya receives 600 and Iran gets 130.
Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies, told Daily NK that Russia “faces serious manpower shortages due to the war’s length” and that labor gaps have emerged “across all industries with the sacrifice of many people on the battlefield, including young soldiers.” Russia accepts North Korean labor “as an urgent means to fill the vacuum.
“Large-scale dispatch of North Korean workers is beginning in earnest as a result of shared interests between North Korea and Russia and mutual bilateral demand,” Lim continued, adding: “This is seen as a move to maximize practical benefits by dispatching labor as an extension of wartime cooperation.”