In a special report, the Asahi Shimbun said North Korean workers dispatched to a joint-venture sewing factory in the Czech Republic, for instance, are paid US$150 a month but their actual net income amounts to only around $30, with the rest seized by the regime in Pyongyang.
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Kim Tae-san, a 60-year-old North Korean who ran the North Korea-Czech joint sewing factory for three years from 2000, told the Japanese paper North Korean workers were able to save only 10 percent of their salaries.
Kim said North Korean female workers at the Czech factory averaged $150 in monthly salary but $75 to $80 of that amount was forcibly remitted to the North's state coffers. In addition, $40 was deducted from their pay for accommodation, $1 for a compulsory subscription to the Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the North's ruling party, and another $2 for the purchase of flowers to be laid before the statue of Kim Il-sung, the late founder of the communist North, Kim said.
In the end, only about $30 stayed in the hands of a female North Korean worker in the Czech Republic, he said.
According to the Japanese paper, North Koreans working as woodcutters in Russia are also subjected to similar wage exploitation.
A typical North Korean woodcutter in Siberia reportedly receives $500 as their monthly salary but their actual take-home pay amounts to $50 to $100, with the rest seized by the North Korean government for various pretexts, the paper said.
Remittances from overseas North Korean workers worth several hundreds of millions of dollars a year, along with exports of mineral resources, are reportedly a key source of hard currency for Pyongyang, which suffered a trade deficit of $630 million last year due largely to U.N. economic sanctions.
In the first quarter of this year, about 19,000 North Korean manual workers entered China, up 40 percent from the same period of the previous year. An estimated 40,000 North Koreans are now working in Russia and the Middle East, while another 3,000 are believed to be working in Mongolia.
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