Supply of North Korean Female Laborers to Russian Market Accelerates

Russian staffing agency Wonderful Employer posted a job advertisement on the local platform Avito, offering to hire a team of 40 North Korean female workers as a single unit for deployment to workplaces in the Moscow region. The agency highlighted the workers' skills in cooking and production tasks, such as making gimbap, noting they could be deployed in various sectors including restaurants, textile factories, and agricultural markets. It has been confirmed that North Korean female workers are also currently employed at a dumpling factory near Moscow and the logistics centers of major e-commerce company Wildberries.

Russian staffing agency Capital Invest Trade is supplying North Korean workers for approximately $12 per hour in construction sites, warehouses, and manufacturing sectors. As these North Korean female workers are placed in various industrial settings such as food processing and light manufacturing, they are playing a role in partially alleviating the labor shortage in these industries. With the large-scale injection of cheap North Korean labor into key industries like logistics and manufacturing, job postings on local Russian recruitment sites seeking interpreters for the Korean language spoken in North Korea are also increasing.

The UN Security Council banned new work permits for North Korean workers and mandated the repatriation of existing workers through resolutions 2375 and 2397 in 2017. Nevertheless, Russia is actively utilizing education visas to circumvent sanctions, issuing approximately 36,000 education visas to North Korean residents last year alone. This highlights the structural vulnerability of the Russian economy's reliance on cheap foreign labor amid severe labor shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, while simultaneously providing North Korea with a crucial source of foreign currency.