“Inside North Korea's Forced-labor Program,” 25 February 2024

...according to State Department estimates, there are currently as many as a hundred thousand North Koreans working in China. Many work at construction companies, textile factories, and software firms. Some also process seafood...there were some eighty thousand North Koreans just in Dandong, a hub of the seafood industry...

In all, I identified fifteen seafood-processing plants that together seem to have used more than a thousand North Korean workers since 2017...

Workers are held in compounds, sometimes behind barbed wire, under the watch of security agents. Many work gruelling shifts and get at most one day off a month. Several described being beaten by the managers sent by North Korea to watch them...Many described enduring sexual assault at the hands of their managers...Of twenty workers, seventeen said that they had been sexually assaulted by their North Korean managers...

The governments of both countries coördinate to place workers, most of whom are women, with seafood companies. The logistics are often handled by local Chinese recruitment agencies...When workers arrive in China, managers confiscate their passports...Factories typically give the women’s money to their managers, who take cuts for themselves and the government, and hold on to the rest until the workers’ terms in China end...

Although it’s Illegal in the U.S. to import goods made with North Korean labor, the law can be difficult to enforce...since 2017, ten of these plants have together shipped more than a hundred and twenty thousand tons of seafood to more than seventy American importers, which supplied grocery stores including Walmart, Giant, ShopRite, and the online grocer Weee! The seafood from these importers also ended up at major restaurant chains, like McDonald’s...[Walmart, Weee!, and McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment. Giant’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, and ShopRite’s parent company, Wakefern, said their suppliers claimed that they currently do not source from the Chinese plant in question, and added that audit reports showed no evidence of forced labor]...

North Korea doesn’t just export seafood workers; it also exports fish... Importing North Korean seafood is forbidden by U.N. sanctions...My team found that seafood from North Korea was imported by several American distributors, including HF Foods, which supplies more than fifteen thousand Asian restaurants in the U.S. [HF Foods did not respond to requests for comment]...