November 23, 2016 - I spotted the two men on a mostly empty side road, both of them clad in paint splattered clothes and carrying tools as they walked away from a construction site in the low, late evening light. I was leaving a restaurant where I had just dined with two professors. I excused myself for a moment and approached the two men, whom I had taken for North Korean laborers.

I started by making small talk in my clumsy Korean, introducing myself and asking what had brought them to Vladivostok, a port city in Russia’s far east. They were open and polite, saying that they’d lived in the city for around a year, being shuttled around to various construction projects. The work was tedious, and the days long, and they looked forward to an end of the day drink at their living quarters, they said.

In our brief conversation, there was one line the North Koreans both said a few times: “We miss our hometown.” Though they were among the relatively privileged North Koreans who get permission to work abroad, they said they wanted to return, and hearing the distress in their voices, I believed them when they said they’d rather be at home, even if home was one of the most repressive countries in the world.

But they added that they needed to remain in Vladivostok for another year to make money. They had families at home to support, they said. Like grownups all over the world, they were sacrificing the familiarity of home to provide for their loved ones.

Those two men were part of the waves of tens of thousands of North Korean workers who toil in countries abroad, often in dangerous conditions, earning meager wages that are heavily garnished by the government in Pyongyang.

I thought of them this week when I came across a report that a North Korean worker had died in an accident in Russia, carried by NK News, citing Russian news outlets. The report said a 45-year-old North Korean man died when a concrete wall fell on a trailer that housed North Korean workers. The report followed news of another North Korean who reportedly died in the Russian city of St. Petersburgh a week before.

The topic of North Koreans sent as cheap labor to Russia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa occasionally makes headlines when a particularly unfortunate case occurs, such as accidental death. The more routine abuses these workers incur, of grueling, dangerous work for less than minimum wage, of having passports seized and being denied basic freedom of movement, are usually ignored.

An investigation earlier this year by Vice found North Koreans working in Poland under conditions that amount to forced labor as defined by the European Convention on Human Rights and by the International Labor Organization. Reporters found a company owned by the North Korean Worker’s Party was involved in sending North Koreans to work on a shipyard, servicing vessels from across the European Union.

In response to the embarrassment that came with the reporting, Poland pledged to stop granting visas to North Korean workers. This will presumably mean that North Koreans already working in Poland will be repatriated. Once home, it is likely that they will have to seek work in North Korea or be dispatched by their government to countries that are more permissible than those in Europe, and where there are fewer nosy Western journalists poking around.

There is another option. Instead of sending the North Koreans home, the governments of Poland and other countries could more strictly manage the conditions they work in to ensure basic safety and legal minimum wage. My hunch is that North Korean workers, such as those I met in Vladivostok that day, would prefer an improvement to their work conditions to being sent home before the end of their contracts.

As a journalist, opportunities for unscripted interactions with North Koreans are uncommon. That evening in Vladivostok, I parted ways with those two North Korean men without asking them many things I was curious about. I would have liked to know the terms of their dispatch to Russia, did they have to pay bribes, or put up a contract fee to get their jobs? How much of their wages did they get to keep, and how much was fleeced by their government? What is the lived experience of a North Korean abroad, and how do people respond when they learn of their country of origin? But instead I opted not to intrude on their peaceful evening with further questions.

I can only hope they finished out their time in Russia and returned home with enough money in their pockets to live comfortably for a time, and didn’t, like the two men who made headlines this week, become a casualty of the North Korean state’s overseas efforts to earn foreign currency.

*Steven Borowiec is a journalist based in Seoul.