The Decibel - How seafood from North Korean forced labour ends up in Canada

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Where does your seafood come from? And who, along the supply chain, handled it? An investigation from the non-profit investigative journalism organization, Outlaw Ocean Project, reveals a network of North Korean labourers at Chinese seafood plants – a violation of United Nations sanctions – supplying certain Canadian seafood companies. The workers detail a pattern of hyper-surveillance, poor pay and sexual assault by their employers.Ian Urbina, executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project, joins The Decibel to discuss the findings of the investigation, the working conditions inside the processing plants and how products made from forced labour are ending up on Canadian store shelves.VIDEO: Investigation reveals North Korean forced labour in Chinese seafood plantsThis episode originally aired on April 9, 2024.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, everyone. This summer on Fridays, we're re-airing some of our best and most listened to episodes of the year. Hope you enjoy it. And we'll be back on Monday with a new episode. Okay. I'm at a grocery store in Toronto. Let's see if I can find what I'm looking for. Our producer, Rachel, is on the hunt for something.

There we go. Okay, we got mussels. Squid. Calamari rings. I'm sure. I guess a squid. Seafood products. Okay, we've got some

pallet filet. This says MSC. Certified Sustainable Seafood. This product comes from a fishery that has been independently certified to the MSC standards for a well-managed sustainable fishery.

Okay, let's see what we got in these freezers. Tempura-buttered fish. Also saying sustainably sourced. These ones all say sustainably sourced on the box. These packages might say they're ethically sourced and produced, but according to a recent investigation in The Globe, that may not always be the case. It found that some of our seafood is coming from plants in China that use forced labor by North Korean workers. This report was done by Outlaw Ocean, a non-profit journalism group that investigates environmental and human rights abuses around the world's oceans. Ian Urbina runs the Outlaw Ocean Project. Today, he'll tell us how they learned about these North Korean workers in China,

what conditions they're living in, and how this seafood is making its way into Canadian grocery stores. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Ian, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. How common is it that Chinese seafood plants are using North Korean workers? What did your investigation find? So we found that 15 plants in this one province that's right near the border of North Korea were using over 1, 1000 North Korean workers, the city where they're

based, there's an estimated 80,000 North Korean workers. But they're in a bunch of different industries, but we found 15 plants. Wow. And what timeframe are we talking about? I mean, the relationship between North Korea and China goes back, you know, many years. But when it became illicit was 2017. And that's when the UN passed sanctions in an effort to try to convince the North Korean government to slow down on its nuclear ambitions. And those sanctions prohibited any countries from using North Korean workers. And the whole world should care. China should care in particular because those sanctions were unanimously passed by the Security Council and China voted on that council. And can you just really spell it out for us here? What is the issue with using North Korean labor? At root, you know, this is a sanctions regime and the hope is to use economic pressure

to convince a government to stop doing something. In this case, it's to get the North Korean government to stop repressing its people and shipping arms to governments that shouldn't have them. And also specifically for North Korea to stop expanding its attempt to have nuclear weapons. So the international community came together in the form of the UN and said, let's apply economic pressure in the form of sanctions. And of the many things that are not allowed to be exported, oil, weapons, certain types of food, workers are also something that the sanctions prohibit the North Korean government

from sending abroad because it's a method for the North Korean government to earn currency and then to fund the very activities that the international community doesn't want happening. Okay, so you found that these seafood processing plants in China are using North Korean workers. What did you learn about what kind of conditions they're working and they're living under? Things are pretty brutal in North Korea, generally, you know. The hermit kingdom, it's a locked empire. And partially because of the sanctions, life in North Korea is heavily surveilled and very tough. The workers who get shipped abroad, in this case to China, these are mostly women in the seafood industry. And normally, so pre-COVID, these were two-year stints and the women would get sent to a factory and stay there for two years. COVID changed everything and made

things worse because the border locked and some of those workers were stuck at their factory for upwards of four years. And a lot of the factories also shut down. So there was no revenue source, and that was an added burden on them. The life on the compounds where these factories are is really tough. These workers are not allowed to watch TV, you know, Chinese TV or international TV, listen to international radio. They're not allowed to leave the compound without permission and without a minder watching over them. They work typically 15 to 20-hour days, six to seven days a week. And what we found, which had not been known before, is there's widespread sexual abuse of these women. Of the 20 workers that we interviewed, 17 of them reported sexual assault.

And you actually managed to interview some of the women who used to work in these plants in China. That's how you found these things out. These women are back in North Korea now. But Ian, given how strict things are in North Korea, how did you actually do this? How did you speak to these women? It was a process. And most of them are now back in North Korea, recently returned, you know, when the border opened only, you know, four months ago. This is after the COVID restrictions were lifted, basically. Exactly. Some of them actually are still in China. And some of the women we interviewed

are still at the factories that we interviewed. You know, surveillance in China and in North Korea is intense. And these workers are definitely not supposed to talk through proxies to journalists. How we did it, we built a sort of grid of investigators that we put under contract. Some of them were in China, in this specific province. Some of them were in North Korea. We assembled a target list of workers that we knew were in the province and likely to be working in seafood plants. And then we figured out who on the ground, meaning locally near the plants, might be able to safely and discreetly either access the plants or meet with the workers in other settings. So the proxies we use, the investigators we use in North Korea would typically meet the women for very short periods, a half an hour, 45 minutes. Normally they would rendezvous in open spaces, so not at their houses because

that's really risky for them. And they could be surveilled, seen, bugged, but they would meet in parks and open streets, you know, these sorts of places. They would talk for 30 minutes. Our investigators would come with a, you know, a list of two dozen questions that I'd written out for them. My investigators would write up their answers. And then through encrypted, you know, means they would send me the photo of the written responses. And what did these women tell you? Can you share some of the things that they had to say? Yeah. I mean, the women across the board described just this kind of crushing sense of captivity, deep sense of despair. Many of them, like I said, were dealing with steady coercion from managers

or plant operators to engage in sex, sometimes even sex for pay for other clients. There were reports of violence from some of the women describing how typically the scenario that they would describe was, you know, an overture by a manager, a sexual overture on the plant for, or the woman would be called to his office at odd hours for some pretext of something he needed, and then behind closed door, he would pressure her into sex. And the fear of any misstep, even inadvertent misstep, something that could be interpreted by the North Korean authorities as an attempted defection or having associated with the wrong person, these are life or death mistakes. So there is also real fear of something going wrong unintentionally and them getting in huge trouble when they get back home. These were sparse interactions, but it was clear

throughout them, just this sense of sadness, deep sadness, and quite especially the sexual abuse, but also the frustration that they had thought they were going to break through and earn some real money by comparison to what they could ever earn in North Korea. They thought by getting this job abroad, they might actually be able to help their family. And that was the other sense of despair was that come to find out there were so many deductions and hidden fees and also work stoppages that they didn't earn what they thought they were going to earn. They were going home often in debt because they had borrowed money to get the job to begin with. The deductions will probably be for a loyalty fee. So that's a huge chunk of money that comes out and goes straight to the government of North Korea. And it's meant to subsidize the regime. And it's just automatic. And then the other deductions are, you know, food and boarding, insurance of, you know, travel insurance, you know, all these sorts of things get pulled out of your wages. And so your wage drops from what you had been told on the front end,

you would earn $100 down to the likes of, you know, $20. And you actually managed to get people inside these seafood plants that seem to be using North Korean labor. Can we talk a little bit about that, Ian? What was that like? And what was that process? these areas, what they had to do was figure out a way to get into the plant. And those varied. In the case of one plant, someone had a friend who was a police officer and the police officer was routinely allowed into the plant just to do a walk around and inspect the facilities. In other cases, we had investigators who visited the facilities, but the outskirts and the parking area and the sort of lot where the workers tend to work out and sort of surveil and observe the facilities so as to see, can you spot North Koreans at the facility? And they're pretty clearly identifiable as different from Chinese. They wear different uniforms. They're obviously speaking a different language.

And also, they always are kept in separate dorms and separate portions of the plants, separate work floors from the Chinese. That's both the Chinese government and the North Korean government wants to keep these populations segregated so there are fewer possible defections. Why do these North Koreans go to these factories? Do they have a choice? I guess, what is the promise here? These are very sought after jobs. In North Korea, the economy is in such shambles that it's very difficult to land any job and the job you might land in a factory or in a store or in any capacity is going to earn you minimal, minimal wages. One-tenth is the take-home average. So if we're dealing with maybe 30 bucks

a month or something like that in a job in a processing plant in China, the equivalent job in North Korea would be three bucks a month. And then the other big attraction is because, again, the North Korean economy is in such shambles, you can't access certain luxury consumer items, you know, microwaves, TVs, these sorts of things, iPhones. And so another attraction for North Koreans to try to land this job is that they will be in a city across the border in China, where if they get lucky, they might be allowed to go shopping, of course, with the minder watching over them. And they might be able to buy something that then they can bring back home if they if they have the money to do so. You mentioned it's tough to get these jobs. It can be highly

coveted. So what is the process like of doing that? First, you would have to get on the list where they would even consider you. And the criteria for consideration, the things that will get you kicked off the list, ruled out. These are all factors that will make the government nervous that you might defect. So do you have any family living abroad that you might try to run to if you get across the border? Do you have any history of legal run-ins in North Korea? Do you have any family members who have ever defected before? Have you been involved in shady political things that they don't like? Any of these things will immediately get you blocked from the list. If you make it on the list and you make it actually through selection process, then you actually have to go through this sort of indoctrination education, which is actually

a process that involves classwork. And you're showing up on the weekends or the nights or whenever it is for a curriculum that the government imposes ostensibly, or at least according to them, it's for the purposes of preparing you so that you're not bamboozled by foreign operatives in China. What that means is, here's what we need you to know so that you are insulated against being wooed by Western ways or how to spot an NGO worker or journalist who might approach you and just the stakes and reasons ideologically that you should stay away from them and not even attempt to talk with them because you'll besmirch the reputation of the North Korean government. And speaking of besmirch, there are even criteria in the selection for height.

So if you're too short, if you're too little, you will not make the list because they don't want short people providing the public image of what North Koreans look like abroad. Do these facilities acknowledge that they're using North Korean workers and North Korean labor? Yes and no. So to the international community, to the West, to the outsiders, no. You know, China says it's dutifully following the UN sanctions and no such workers exist in the country. But if you mine OSI, open source intelligence, so cell phone footage that's posted publicly on Duyan, which is the Chinese version of TikTok, you know, Facebook, these sorts of

platforms, if you know how to mine this kind of material, you find lots of evidence of these workers because there's open discussion by the workers, by city residents who are gawking at the workers. There's a whole genre of male gawkers at the mostly female workers working out and they're commenting, oh my gosh, they're so pretty, et cetera, et cetera. And we mined that strand because there's a keyword, Korean beauties, that if you know how to search, you'll find all this footage.

No, I mean, some of the videos we found, like this one, is showing women workers in the yard in front of the factory, dancing to music as a break from work. And some passerby filmed it. You can verify all the footage if you know how to look at the geotagging and who uploaded it and the language issues. And we sent much of it to experts who also specialize in North Korean language and culture, and they verified as well. And your investigation found that some of these negotiations for labor are out in the

open online, like this is just happening on the internet. Can you tell me about that? Yeah, I mean, it's almost like a spot market for these workers, where you have just average entrepreneurial types in China and North Korea who pop up on the internet and are offering sort of middleman services. And they're on these platforms openly saying, either querying, hey, I've got a guy who needs 20 workers, he needs them by March. And does anyone have any cheap North Korean workers that can move on that timetable at this price point? And then folks will emerge to say, yeah, I know how to get those. There are a lot of these labor brokers on either

side of the border who are trying to move people to interested parties in various industries. And then above them, there's agencies, you know, the fisheries agency in North Korea, and then above it, the money from this industry goes to a place called Room 39, which is this bureau in the North Korean government that's got involvement in lots of shady things, including foreign assassinations, weapons distribution to sanctioned countries, kidnappings, the weapons of mass destruction program. It is the sort of dark room where all foreign currency comes in, but lots of bad behavior comes out. And you mentioned that North Korea is getting money from this, like they literally take

a chunk of these workers paychecks. But what is in it for China? Why do they want to do this? Cheap labor and lots of other benefits. So if you're running a factory, you could hire 50 North Korean women who live at the plant, are not allowed to leave, and for whom you don't have to pay health insurance and you don't have to pay into a pension. Or you can hire Chinese workers who are going to cost per month five times, ten times more. They go home at night and on the weekends. If they get injured on the job or sick, you need to pony up. So the cost is very different. And the security as a plant operator is also very different because these are pliant, captured workers as opposed to Chinese citizens who have some rights. We'll be back in a minute.

Okay, so you were able to actually trace the seafood from these factories, Ian, to Canadian stores. So let's go through some names here. Like, which companies did you find had connections to these seafood plants? And what stores are they selling to? The saddest part of this reporting is the ubiquity of the problem. It's really pervasive globally. In the case of Canada, a lot of major grocery store chains, Walmart, McDonald's, Trident, Cisco are some big names. A company called Highliner is a big Canadian company that imports a lot of seafood and then downstreams it to restaurants and grocery store chains. Highliner was also tied very directly to these plants that have North Koreans. What have the companies said in response to these allegations? The majority of the companies, I mean, we reached out to over 200 companies in the course of the investigation and published all of what we said to them and what they said back in full on the website. The vast majority just stonewalled us and would not engage and would not respond.

Some did engage. Highliner included, Cisco included, McDonald's and Trident included. These companies tended to respond that they're looking into it and they'll get back to us. In some cases, in the case of Highliner, for example, they said they were going to sever ties with the specific plant that we had identified them being connected to, at least until they could independently look into the matter. This is a success in the journalism world, in one sense, but not in another. This is a success in the journalism world in one sense, but not in another. You know, this is cutting off the tumor, but not really confronting the cancer. You know, the deeper problem here isn't that one plant. It's that the very oversight mechanisms

of Highliner or the companies in general and the auditing firms that are supposed to police this stuff are not working. And so that's the core problem that needs to be corrected so that we don't in three, produce the same story again. Seafood is an unusually complicated and opaque supply chain because stuff is getting pulled out of the oceans, often in the high seas, then taken on land in processing plants and handed off that are far away from us typically, and then hand it off between lots of middlemen before they reach our restaurant table or the shelf. Seafood is therefore very far behind other products when it comes to companies knowing what's going on in their supply

chains and actually having tools for ensuring that forced labor or environmental crimes or what have you are not part of their supply chains. Seafood is playing catch up. So are there not audits that go into these plants or anything like that to make sure that they're operating above board? With seafood, there are categorically two types of audits. There are marine and food safety audits on one side, and those are auditors who go in and check the plant and sometimes the ship history to see, did this come out of waters that you weren't supposed to take it out of illegal fishing? And then when it got to the plant, was it handled hygienically? Is that tilapia really tilapia or is it a fake tilapia? These sorts of questions. Those are marine auditors. Then there's social audits, which are a different category of auditors.

Those folks are looking at working conditions, be it on the ships where they rarely, if ever, go, and then in the plants. But in a place like China, it's a little bit thorny because if you're an auditor and you're showing up at a plant in China, number one, you're probably showing up having told the plant you were coming. So that plant's probably going to clean things up to make sure that they get the A on their report card. So that makes the audit kind of unusable. The other issue is in China, there are certain taboo issues you cannot discuss and expect to be asked back. You might even get kicked out of the country. It's why a lot of news organizations have been kicked out of the country, because they dare to talk about certain things like human rights, like Uyghurs, like North Koreans. Yeah. I guess I'm trying to understand this because your investigation found that half the

plants, I believe, you linked to North Korean workers. Those were certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, which is a sustainability group, right? That kind of signs off on seafood products. So how is that happening? Well, so Marine Search of Council, MSC, is the biggest player in this realm. They give certification that this fish is sustainably fished, came from waters where it should have, and it's properly labeled, et cetera. So they're marine. Now, to get a little seal that says we're MSC approved, you have to have a prerequisite social audit. You've got to show up to MSC with this document in hand before they will give you their extra approval. What that means is MSC is partially involved in the labor issue, even though they very quickly

will tell you they're not. All right. So half of all the plants that we looked at had these really serious labor abuses involved in them, and they had been approved by MSC, which speaks to the core problem in what MSC is doing. So the question begged is, how are they going to ensure that if they're going to be associated with social audits, they're legitimate social audits? Let me ask you about Canada here, Ian. I'm wondering, how does Canada compare to other places like the US, say, when it comes to clamping down on importing products made with North Korean labor? So Canada is behind in several ways. One is, it lacks a couple of key laws that, at least in the U.S., advocates and academics say have been really helpful in policing these issues. One law in the U.S. is called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and it's specifically focused on any products that come into our country.

If it's tied to Uyghurs, we're going to block them. And then the second law is called CAATSA, Countering Americans' Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which is specifically focused on the same issue, but for North Korean labor. Now, the enforcement of those two laws is where things are not so great in the US. But these two laws are really, really powerful laws, and they exist in the US, and they don't exist in Canada. So the tools for enforcement aren't there. Then the other thing that Canada lacks that U.S. has a little bit better of is the data to actually know when things are coming into your country. So a lot comes into Canada about which not that much is known. front and better police products that it doesn't want to enter because it's tied to dark stuff, then they would have to increase how much data is collected whenever products come in. Yeah. And we should say Canada did amend the Customs Tariff Act in 2020,

which prohibits imports made with forced labor. But up until last year, authorities had not stopped a single shipment from entering the country. So this kind of gets back to what you were saying there. Before I let you go, Ian, just lastly, I guess I wonder how we as consumers should be thinking about things. Like how should we be thinking about seafood in our stores, you know, the next time that we go grocery shopping? I think we all are just people, right? You know, we're average folk who are very busy. And so the first thing to do is to realize that we have a lot, we wear lots of different hats, right? So you and I are interlocutors, we talk to people, our partner, kids or friends. And so informing ourselves about issues of concern so that we can spread the word matters, it really does help. And then we additionally are consumers,

right? We buy things. And so when it comes to seafood, knowing that there's some real concerns about seafood, you get on the internet, you Google, I want to eat shrimp. I might want to buy shrimp that's locally caught if I can, but I need to check out what that brand is. It's locally caught. It might be a little bit better because the supply chain isn't brand is. It's locally caught. It might be a little bit better because the supply chain isn't so long. It's less dark. So you do a little research and you make a little bit better informed decisions

to lower your risk a little bit. None of these are silver bullets, but there are lots of different small ways that all of us can make a difference. Ian, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.