The paradox of North Korea’s Overseas Labour Programme

North Korea’s overseas labour programme exposes a central paradox of totalitarian control: a state that demands absolute obedience at home deliberately sends its citizens abroad, risking ideological exposure in exchange for financial gain.

On paper, the logic seems simple. Pyongyang needs money, and it has people. Through the labour programme, tens of thousands of North Koreans are deployed to construction sites, factories and farms from Russia to China, working impossibly long hours in tightly controlled compounds for wages they barely see. But this is not just a story about forced labour and revenue. It is also a story about risk: ideological, political, and profoundly human. And it explains why the argument for shutting the system down through sanctions is anything but clear-cut.

Exporting obedience, importing doubt

The overseas labour system supports Pyongyang’s desires by delivering hard currency, extracting maximum value from workers, and using labour as diplomatic leverage with host states. All of this is done while trying to preserve the regime’s ideological monopoly over its people.

Economically, the stakes are high. Estimates suggest that North Korea’s overseas labour programme generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year, a critical lifeline for a heavily sanctioned economy with almost no access to formal markets. Potentially far more if one includes IT workers engaged in cybercrime, at times stealing over a billion dollars annually in crypto assets. Domestically, these deployments are framed as a rare privilege: a “once-in-a-lifetime” chance to earn foreign currency or glimpse the world. Selection is less about skill than obedience and collateral; married workers with families at home, politically “clean” backgrounds, people who can be controlled.

Once abroad, the reality quickly strips away any illusion. Quotas (Gukga Gyehoekbun; 국가 계획분) set in Pyongyang turn wages into debt. Workers endure twelve to sixteen hours of labour in freezing conditions, with passports confiscated, movement restricted, and surveillance constant. Many describe receiving only a few dollars a month in “cigarette money.” Most say they volunteered, though almost all later describe the labour as forced. As one respondent put it: “Choosing to go abroad is like choosing the wider prison cell.” Even inside this “wider prison,” something Pyongyang cannot fully script begins to unfold.

Workers see things they were never meant to see: electricity that stays on, people who speak freely, weekends, soldiers with smartphones, women driving, co-workers who can complain if their wages are late. One worker recalled stepping off the train in Russia: “The moment I got off, I knew I’d been told a lie my whole life.” Another realised, for the first time, that the conditions he had accepted as normal amounted to human rights violations no rest days, no real pay, no freedom of choice.

Information seeps in through borrowed devices and whispered conversations. Workers save for months, quit smoking, or take illicit side jobs to buy a second-hand phone. South Korean dramas and YouTube clips watched in cramped dorm rooms at midnight become small apertures to an unscripted world. Some quietly share what they learn. Others hide surplus wages, send remittances through brokers, or take on cheongbu (청부); illicit side contracts that carve out slivers of agency within a system built to deny it.

Most do not defect. They go home. But they do not return the same. They bring back more than roubles: stories of ordinary freedoms, of workplaces where pay actually arrives, of lives not organised around loyalty rituals. They tell their families, cautiously, “There’s no need to be loyal to the country. Look out for your own lives.” In a system sustained by illusion, this kind of knowledge is the most subversive currency of all. Pyongyang recognises the danger. It tightens surveillance, expands ideological sessions, and increases post-deployment scrutiny. But containment is not control. Once doubt takes hold, it cannot be unlearned.

Why closing the system may not reduce exploitation

Workers in Woljong Buddhist temple North Korea. Credit: Roman Harak. CC BY-SA 2.0

 Workers in Woljong Buddhist temple North Korea. Credit: Roman Harak. CC BY-SA 2.0

Sanctions alone cannot reduce exploitation and help those most affected by North Korea’s overseas labour system. Broad restrictions often miss the dynamics that shape workers’ vulnerability.

A recurring insight from workers’ experiences is that the most immediate harm stems from daily conditions: long hours, surveillance, withheld documents and the absence of any protective recourse. When interventions indiscriminately shut down worksites, the abuse does not disappear. It becomes harder to see. Deployments shift into more opaque subcontracting chains, where oversight diminishes and retaliation increases. The result is less leverage for workers, not more.

Leaving a controlled site is also far more dangerous than it appears from the outside. Escape is not an endpoint; it is the beginning of a fragile journey shaped by border enforcement, legal uncertainty, and the constant risk of forced return. Measures that focus primarily on revenue denial can unintentionally push workers into riskier underground routes or provoke collective punishment at home. 

Designing interventions that protect, not punish

 Economic exploitation lies at the centre of the overseas labour system; however, sanctions rarely address it directly. Denying revenue to the state does not remedy years of lost wages or the structural extraction workers describe. Without mechanisms that acknowledge and redress this exploitation, sanctions risk attacking the symbol rather than the substance of harm.

Finally, protection cannot end once someone leaves the DPRK’s control. Many carry psychological strain, fears for family members and the challenge of restarting life in unfamiliar environments. When interventions reduce legal avenues to earn, move or settle, they narrow the very alternatives workers need to build independent lives.

These patterns suggest that interventions that truly serve affected communities must be designed around their lived realities, not only around state-focused calculations. This requires distinguishing between measures that symbolically punish Pyongyang and those that tangibly improve workers’ safety, agency and options. It also requires preserving, rather than collapsing, the limited channels through which some North Koreans encounter life beyond state narratives.

North Korea’s overseas labour system is sustained by control, economic necessity and the unintended exposure that workers experience abroad. Interventions that overlook this hybridity are prone to backfire. Those that acknowledge it stand a better chance of reducing harm without closing the narrow cracks through which awareness, choice and possibility begin to form.

Exposure is not liberation. It is not inherently good, nor is it harmless. It is a site of ambiguity, risk, and sometimes quiet, irreversible change. And it often begins in the most unremarkable of moments, when a worker glimpses an unscripted world and feels, for the first time, the ground beneath their certainty shift. That moment will never appear in a sanctions report. But it is exactly what Pyongyang fears most. Not collapse. Doubt.

Read more:
Exporting labour, importing risk: The paradox of the North Korean Overseas Labour Programme, Working paper, Yeji Kim, November 2025

Yeji Kim consults for NGOs, governments, and monitoring bodies on DPRK policy and accountability pathways. She holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the transnational movement of money and information between the North Korean diaspora and North Korea, and she contributes to democracy education initiatives across UK schools.

Contact: mail@yeji.kim