Global Rights Compliance Investigation:
The Story of Guemhyuk

A Day in the Life of a DPRK State-sponsored Labourer
in St. Petersburg, Russia

Over 100,000 North Korean nationals are currently exploited abroad as part of a DPRK state-sponsored forced labour programme . These workers are deployed to generate foreign currency revenue for the DPRK government often under conditions that constitute forced labour, as per the ILO definition.

The hiring of DPRK workers is a direct violation of United Nations sanctions. Under UN Security Council Resolutions 2375 (2017) and 2397 (2017) , all Member States are banned from providing work authorisations to DPRK workers and are required to repatriate DPRK nationals earning income within their jurisdictions.

364 days
Maximum number of days workers are on duty annually, with virtually no rest days.
14 hours
Average daily shift length. Workers typically work 12 or more hours per day, some up to 16 hours.
10 USD
Monthly wages reported by workers we interviewed. Some workers finish a full year in debt due to quota systems.

Global Rights Compliance, together with their local partner, spoke to 21 DPRK nationals who have worked on, or are currently working on construction sites across 3 Russian cities. Some held managerial roles. All were male. All worked in construction. Their experiences differ but the system controlling them was the same.

The story that follows is a combination of those testimonies into a single day — one that repeats across sites, seasons and years. Guemhyuk, the central figure in this story, is fictional. All sources have been anonymised and aggregated for their protection.

Meet Guemhyuk

Name: Guemhyuk Kim Hometown: Pyongyang, North Korea Age: 29 Dispatched Site: Saint Petersburg, Russia Year of Dispatch: 2024 Designated work site: Large-scale stadium construction project

Guemhyuk was born in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1997. He has a daughter and a wife whom he misses every day. With a dream of affording a bigger house for his family, he bribed a local official to come out to work in Russia in 2024. His biggest fear is returning home without much money, even after his best attempts to save as much as he could.

“Working long hours is something I can endure, but what troubles me most is not earning enough relative to the work I put in. On top of that, being away from my wife and daughter is difficult. If I cannot bring home enough money, it feels as though I am failing them.”
— Male, Age 52, from Sinuiju, North Korea

How to Read this Story

The International Labour Organization’s (ILO) 11 indicators of forced labour are used globally to detect situations where work is imposed through coercion rather than free consent.

Throughout this story, moments from the daily life of a typical worker are paired with relevant ILO forced labour indicators. Individually, no single indicator proves forced labour. Taken together, they reveal patterns of control, coercion, and abuse that define this regime of state-sponsored forced labour.

ILO Indicators nails illustration

Five Key Findings from Our Research

The overseas labour programme serves Pyongyang's strategic interests rather than workers' economic opportunity

The programme is an instrument of three overlapping DPRK government interests: extracting hard currency, securing diplomatic leverage, and maintaining military advantage. Workers become instruments of state policy, not beneficiaries of economic opportunity.
Workers have agency, but that doesn't negate coercion

Workers often apply and even bribe DPRK officials for the opportunity to work abroad. But there is a significant information gap between what they are told and the reality they face. We must acknowledge workers' embedded agency while equally recognising that this constitutes state-sponsored forced labour, prohibited under international law.
The DPRK state quota system makes the overseas labour programme fundamentally exploitative.

Workers go abroad hoping to earn money and build a better life. However, the state quota (gukga gyehoekbun, 국가 계획분) systematically drains their wages. Unless this is abolished, the programme remains fundamentally exploitative for DPRK workers, regardless of any incidental benefits, like foreign exposure.
Side jobs (ch'ŏngbu, 청부) are how workers survive, and what resilience looks like under duress.

For most DPRK workers, moonlighting is not optional — it is the only way to survive the month. Side jobs are illegal, invisible, and unprotected. But without them, the quota cannot be met, and falling short means being sent home and blacklisted. Workers take the risk because they have no alternative.
Workers want immediate relief.

What workers want most is not hard law accountability but grounded, immediate alleviation of harsh conditions: proper safety equipment at worksites, reduced working hours, a less exploitative quota system, opportunities to stay in touch with families back home, and better pathways for those who want to defect.

05:30 am

Guemhyuk wakes up

Dawn breaks with a scratchy noise from the loudspeakers, dragging me from a stiff plywood bunk inside an unheated shipping container on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.

All 20 of us sleep in this cramped room, bodies side by side. We are chronically sleep-deprived from long shifts and brutal living conditions. The sleeping containers are infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. I can't even remember the last time I properly showered. There's no shower facility so we just clean off our face with a tap. From our sleeping container to the work site is 200 metres. The path is nothing but mud; your shoes sink right in.

Abusive Working and Living Conditions

Unheated containers, loudspeaker wakeups, overcrowding are tools, designed to exhaust the body and break down resistance until people submit. Coercion does not only work through violence or threats but through the daily grind of an environment built to wear you down.

Why Pyongyang Sends Its People Abroad

North Korea’s overseas state-sponsored labour programme is not simply an economic arrangement, nor is it an ad hoc response to scarcity. It is a central pillar of the state’s survival strategy. Facing chronic foreign currency shortages, extensive international sanctions, and extremely limited access to global markets, Pyongyang relies on the export of labour as one of its most reliable sources of hard currency.

Estimates suggest that the programme generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually revenue that sustains the privileges of the elite, underwrites military ambitions, and stabilises the government’s internal patronage networks.

At the same time, overseas deployment functions as a mechanism of domestic control. These postings are framed as rare privileges, “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities granted only to those deemed politically reliable.

Access to foreign currency and limited exposure to the outside world are used as incentives, selectively distributed to reward loyalty and discipline. Workers are chosen not only for their capacity to provide labour, but for their likelihood of obedience: those with spouses, children, or elderly parents left behind are prioritised, as family functions as collateral against defection.

Hiring DPRK nationals is prohibited under UN Security Council Resolutions 2397 (2017) and 2375 (2017). In this sense, Pyongyang does not merely export labour. It exports obedience. The programme reflects a calculated wager that tightly managed exposure can be monetised without eroding ideological control. Workers are mobilised not as autonomous economic actors, but as state assets deployed abroad to generate revenue while remaining firmly embedded within the government’s architecture of discipline.

06:00 am

We move to the worksite together, always as a group. Guards control the perimeter.

The city may be just beyond the fence, but we are sealed off from it. A few times a year, we are allowed out, but only in groups, heads counted, with a fixed time to return. They say it is for our protection.

Restriction of Movement

Workers employed directly by companies typically live in containers on construction sites, making it nearly impossible to leave freely.

07:00 am

I see my Uzbek colleague carrying his passport and wonder where mine is. He uses it to get more contracts and to come in and out of the worksite. My passport was taken on arrival. I haven’t held the original document since then. When we are asked for identification documents, a supervisor handles it. We are only allowed to keep a photocopy.

In practice, the document that identifies me is kept by someone else.

Retention of Identity Documents

Document retention is one of the clearest indicators of forced labour. Without a passport, workers cannot travel, change jobs, or often access essential services. Of all the workers we interviewed, not one said they were able to retain their own ID.

The physical passport is held by the company, and the photocopy of my passport is kept by the unit manager.

When police suddenly raid the worksite to inspect passports, that’s when the paper passports are distributed to each person individually to get through the inspection. Once it’s done, they’re collected again.

— R15, Male 50

“Retention by the employer of identity documents or other valuable personal possessions deprives workers of the ability to travel, obtain other jobs, or access essential services.”

International Labour Organization, ILO Indicators of Forced Labour (2025 revised edition)

How North Korean Workers are Sent to Foreign Countries

The process through which North Korean workers are sent abroad is neither transparent nor voluntary in any meaningful sense. Recruitment is conducted through a tightly centralised chain of command, beginning in Pyongyang and cascading down through ministries, provincial authorities, and local party organs.

No positions are publicly advertised, and most workers remain unaware of selection criteria until they are selected. Political reliability, family background, and perceived compliance matter as much, if not more than, technical skill.

Once selected, workers undergo multiple rounds of interviews, document screening, and ideological instruction. Travel is organised exclusively in groups and supervised by political officers or interpreters tasked with monitoring behaviour and defection risk.

Upon arrival in the host country, passports are immediately confiscated and retained by North Korean security officials in Russia. Workers are issued, at best, photocopies, reinforcing that legal identity and freedom of movement do not belong to the individual, but to the state.

Although workers physically cross borders, they do not exit the North Korean system.

Movement, documentation, and interaction with local society remain tightly choreographed. Overseas deployment thus represents not a loosening of control, but its extension.

The individual is transformed into an administrative unit, transported across borders while remaining enclosed within the government’s bureaucratic and ideological grasp.

Opacity of Employer Structures

A significant proportion of the workers interviewed were unaware of which Russian company they were formally working for. This opacity may serve as a mechanism for obscuring lines of accountability.

In the arrangements described by respondents, brokers or intermediary contractors hold the formal contracts, while North Korean workers carry out the actual labour.

Dispatch Chain from Pyongyang to Local Labour Lists

The process by which North Korea dispatches workers abroad, to Russia and other countries, involves a rigorous, multi-stage screening procedure. At each stage, candidates are closely evaluated on political loyalty, physical health, and social reliability.

The entire process operates under the systematic control of the state and the Party, and every step requires official authorisation and adherence to Party directives.

During selection, each candidate's political background, family origin (songbun), and Party commitment are thoroughly examined. Anyone suspected of ideological deviation or deemed insufficiently loyal is disqualified. Final review and approval rest with the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea.

This is to ensure that every individual sent abroad is fit to represent the North Korean regime and to carry out the mission of earning foreign currency on behalf of the state.

09:00 am

At work, I am always on my guard. Here, you can never fully trust anyone, because it is a known secret that every worksite has at least one informer.

Work itself is hard, but not being able to trust anyone is harder. Control comes not just from the guards, but from the knowledge that anyone around you could report you. I keep my face neutral. I constantly worry about getting caught with a phone, which we are not allowed to have.

Intimidation & Threats

Workers live under constant surveillance, not just from their bosses, but also from each other. Informants are planted among crews to report dissent, escape attempts, or even private complaints. The consequences are concrete:

"Spies report people at the worksite who browse the internet or watch American films, Korean films, or sexual content. Those individuals are punished by the North Korean authorities depending on the severity — tagged and sent back to North Korea."

Surveillance is both vertical and horizontal. Political officers, team leaders, and embedded informants monitor behaviour, while collective punishment ensures that individuals police one another.

I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. I spent too long under surveillance — even in a quiet room, I feel like someone’s coming for me. That psychological anxiety — that’s the hardest part.”
— R2 Male 64, from South Hwanghae Province, North Korea

12:00 pm

Every afternoon, I find myself calculating whether I can meet this month's quota. The mandatory monthly quota (gukga gyehoekbun, 국가 계획분) levied by Pyongyang is a central fact of life for every DPRK worker abroad.

Most workers had never heard of it before they arrived. I came out not knowing how much I would receive. I just thought that if I went to Russia, I’d earn money – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a state quota.

Deception

The biggest burden workers face is the ‘Gukga gyehoekbun’ (국가 계획분; meaning quota), the mandatory monthly payment to the North Korean state, typically ranging from 400 to 750 USD per month according to respondents. Some workers knew about it before departure; most did not.

02:30 pm

It is blizzarding now and my entire body feels like a wet towel. My hands are cracked and swollen from the cold. They freeze so badly that gripping tools becomes agony. If I could just have a proper pair of gloves, I would have nothing more to wish for. There is no heating on the worksite. No equipment provided. No one asks if you are coping.

If someone slows down, the rest of us pay: longer hours, fewer breaks, punishment that teaches the group to police itself. Today, my friend Jinwoo next to me could barely grip his tools. His hands were shaking from the cold and his work had slowed to a crawl. The team leader walked over without a word and struck him across the face. He told him to keep up or the whole crew would stay until midnight. Jinwoo said nothing. He picked up his tools and kept going. None of us said anything either.

"Rain or heavy snow, we show up and work. Not a single day off."
— R28, Male 20

Physical and Sexual Violence

Work continues regardless of weather conditions, with workers describing labouring through Russian winters with no protective equipment and no option to stop.

Site managers wield near-total authority. Physical violence is not the primary mechanism of control, but it is far from absent. Some managers avoid direct violence, but others do not.

"The site manager doesn’t hit people, but he is always verbally abusing us. He has connections to the company boss, so he acts without fear. There’s never a moment when he’s not using foul language." The threat of repatriation is the ultimate lever: workers who refuse to pay or who fall short are expelled, and their families at home bear the consequences.

Structural Violence Through Labour Conditions

The combination of poor working conditions and excessively long hours constitutes a form of structural violence. The primary objective is to extract maximum economic output from workers. Physical well-being may be carefully maintained, since workers need to remain healthy to be productive.

05:30 pm

Today is payday. The wages I was promised are nowhere. They note the deductions. Travel expenses, food, and above all the monthly quota. If the quota is not met, the shortfall carries forward.

Today I receive a small amount, barely enough to buy cigarettes. After deductions, there is often nothing left. We are told the quota must be met "by whatever means possible."

Withholding of wages

Control is exercised not through direct coercion, but through the state quota system, which functions as the primary mechanism of discipline. With only state-designated work, workers reported earning on average 800 USD per month in total, but after the state quota, living expenses, and debt from travelling fees are deducted, there is often nothing left to send home or keep for themselves.

Workers reported being told they must meet the quota "by whatever means possible," which drives them to take on side jobs known as ch'ŏngbu (청부; meaning moonlighting or side job), often under dangerous or exploitative conditions, just to earn a little more.

Systemic Extraction of Workers’ Wages docs illustration

08:00 pm

I have just badly injured my arm while working. There is nothing I can do about it right now. I have to treat it myself, with whatever I can find once I return from work. Last month I was sick and was given salt water and told to continue.

Injuries are ignored unless they prevent work entirely. There is no provision for recovery, because being hurt does not excuse you from the quota. No one cares whether I am injured or not. Only the quota matters.

"Even if you're injured, there's nothing. You have to treat yourself."
— R11, Male 49

"It felt like they thought our lives were worth no more than insects."
— R13, Male 50

Abuse of vulnerability

Illness is not treated as a medical problem. It is treated as a performance problem. The message is consistent across testimonies. The body is an asset to be used, not a person to be cared for.

10:00 pm

The evenings are the hardest. My body is so exhausted that when the day finally winds down, the loneliness hits all at once. I think of my wife and my daughter, whom I love the most. They are the only ones who keep me going but contacting them is next to impossible.

Calls are monitored; messages do not move freely. Sometimes months pass without my family knowing where I am, or me knowing how they are.

"Many people carry two phones — one to hand over when inspections come. The touchscreen one is for the internet."
— R13, Male 50

Isolation

Officially, mobile phones are prohibited. In practice, access varies by workplace: some employers permit smartphones, while others restrict workers to basic feature phones. Where smartphones are available, workers use them primarily to consume Korean-language content — films, news, YouTube.

That is how information about home reaches them. But access comes with risk. Workers caught watching South Korean content or browsing the internet are reported by informants and may be sent home. Home, in this context, is not a relief. It means blacklisting, interrogation, and consequences for the family left behind. For many workers, a contraband phone is the only window to the outside world — and even that window is watched.

What worries me most is my family back home. My wife has a heart condition and I genuinely worry about how she's managing. I need to send money, but I haven't saved anything — last year I could only send $200.

The site manager didn't lay hands on him directly — he had two people who do it for him. The man was badly beaten, and the next day his eyes were bruised and his ribs were broken so he couldn't get up. He lay in the dormitory for about two weeks unable to work.

11:00 pm

There are also no set break times or work hours for us. Twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day, whatever the quota demands. The day does not end when the hours are done; it ends when the target is met.

Refusal is not an option. In a whole month, there is not a single day of rest, doing anything we are told to do to put this building up.

Excessive overtime

Workers consistently report working 12 to 16 hours per day, typically starting at 7 or 8 in the morning and continuing until 10 or 11 at night, sometimes until midnight. Rest days are virtually non-existent: most describe working every day of the month, with no weekends, no public holidays, and at best one day off per month, usually only when construction materials run out.

Several workers express distress at being unable to rest on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays, like workers in other countries. The schedule is driven entirely by the production plan, not by any regulated limit on working hours. This constitutes a clear indicator of forced labour under the ILO framework, as the volume and duration of work far exceed what can be considered voluntary or reasonable.

"Making people work through the night without letting them sleep, that's the real violence. What else would you call violence? Only us (North) Koreans come out here and work all night. The Russians and people from other countries, when it hits 5 or 6 o'clock, they put down whatever they're doing and go home. Even cattle don't work this hard. We're living lives worse than cattle." (R26, Male 50)

12:00 am

The day has finally ended. But tomorrow will be no different. At night, I think back to when I agreed to come. I believed I would return home with savings. Instead, I am still paying off the debt from getting here. The airfare, the registration fees, the costs I did not know about until I arrived. Every month, the quota takes almost everything. What little remains goes toward the debt. I do not know when it will be cleared. Some months, I fall further behind. I did not understand how little I would earn, how long it would take to pay off what I owe, or that my family would be used to keep me in place.

If I ever die out of exhaustion or by sheer accident, please remember my name. My name is Guemhyuk, and I just wanted to do my best for my family.

"There's only one thing missing — freedom. If there were freedom, I could take the money I earned and do with it as I pleased, call my family every day, work when I want. Without it, I have to live like this."
— R21, Male 50 from Pyongyang, North Korea

ILO Forced Labour Indicators

Among the 21 workers we interviewed, we identified all 11 International Labour Organization indicators of forced labour. No single worker experienced every indicator, but each of the 11 was present across the testimonies — meaning that cumulatively, these accounts document every form of forced labour under international law.

Nearly universal experiences
(present in 20+ interviews):

Debt bondage (forced to work off fabricated or inflated debts)
Retention of identity documents
Restriction of movement
Withholding of wages
Abusive working and living conditions
Excessive overtime

Widespread systematic control
(present in 10-20 interviews):

Isolation from outside contact
Intimidation and threats
Abuse of vulnerability (exploitation of desperate circumstances)
Deception about work conditions
Physical and sexual violence

These are overlapping systems of control. A worker might have their passport confiscated and be threatened and have wages withheld and live in unheated containers all at once. This layered coercion makes escape nearly impossible

Unfortunately, Guemhyuk’s story is not exceptional. It is representative.

There are tens of thousands of North Korean people just like Guemhyuk in Russia working under abusive conditions. As the DPRK's need for foreign currency continues to rise, amid sanctions, economic isolation, and shifting geopolitical alliances, the number of people dispatched overseas is likely to increase rather than decline in the coming years.

Global Rights Compliance Recommends:

→ The International Community
- Move beyond abstract condemnation toward coordinated, worker-centred accountability, grounded in ILO forced-labour indicators.
- Support independent monitoring, documentation, and safe-exit pathways for DPRK workers abroad.
- Sanction companies trading with companies involved in the use of forced labour by DPRK workers.
→ The South Korean Government
- Continue to elevate DPRK overseas state-imposed labour as a human rights issue, not solely a sanctions or security concern.
- Support documentation efforts, survivor-centred advocacy, and international coordination.
→ Russia
- Ensure that any foreign labour arrangements comply with international labour standards, including freedom of movement, wage transparency, and access to grievance mechanisms.
- Grant labour inspectors, UN mechanisms, and independent observers’ meaningful access to worksites.
- End the use of DPRK labour, including under reclassification schemes, in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 2375 (2017) and 2397 (2017).
→ For Civil Society Organisations
- Use forced-labour import bans, supply-chain due-diligence laws, and targeted sanctions submissions to disrupt exploitation without targeting workers themselves.
- Investigate companies, intermediaries, and state actors that knowingly benefit from DPRK forced labour.
- Centre the voices and lived experiences of workers in all accountability efforts.

A Day in the Life of a DPRK State-sponsored Labourer in St. Petersburg, Russia