Perhaps the only thing tougher than interviewing workers in China about human rights is doing the same in North Korea.
Still, it seemed worth trying because it might shed new light on the experiences of thousands of relatively invisible people who, as it turns out, provide much of the seafood consumed in the U.S. and Europe.
What we found was chilling: women held captive in processing plants in China, dispatched there by the North Korean government, only to face violence, wage theft and rampant sexual abuse. And much of the seafood coming from these plants supply major American companies like McDonald’s, Sysco and Walmart, which is a violation of U.N. sanctions and U.S. law.
Today, we published this reporting.
The piece was the third part in a series investigating human-rights and environmental abuses in the global seafood industry. My team and I focussed on China, which operates the world's largest high-seas fishing fleet and processes much of the seafood eaten in the West. Workers on these types of fishing boats are easily rendered invisible, because their work often keeps them offshore for years, typically in gritty isolation far from the reach of governments or law enforcement. This sense of invisibility is an especially serious problem for workers on Chinese ships and in Chinese factories, because the country is resistant to inspections by journalists, N.G.O.s, or regulators, particularly when they involve human-rights concerns.
The previous stories in our series had involved boarding Chinese ships at sea or getting a view into Chinese plants that employed Uyghurs, a highly repressed ethnic minority forced to work in factories around the country. This story was even tougher to report, however, because it required interviewing North Korean workers, some who were still in China, and others who had returned to the Hermit Kingdom. The North Korean government sends these workers to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, and then takes their salaries—a vital source of foreign currency for the regime. China's use of North Korean workers violates U.N. sanctions, which China had joined other nations in signing. When the seafood that these workers produce is shipped to American consumers, it is also a violation of U.S. law.
To interview these workers, we assembled a team of investigators and sources in China and in South Korea and elsewhere who employ contacts in North Korea to get information out of the country. These contacts met covertly with workers—sometimes in fields or parks or on city streets, where it was more difficult to be tracked by state security surveillance. They asked the workers and managers, all of whom are women, a series of questions that we provided, and then ferreted the transcripts of the conversations back to us, using encrypted phones and other means. In their answers, workers described experiences of loneliness, despair, and fear in Chinese factories; many shared stories of suffering violence and sexual abuse at the hands of managers. “They kicked us and treated us as subhuman,” one woman said. Another explained, “I was forced to have sex during the pandemic, and that was the worst and most frustrating part.”
We also dispatched investigators to seafood plants in China who, in some cases, filmed the North Koreans processing seafood. Further, we mined social media for footage of North Korean workers there. Finally, we traced those plants to Western buyers using export data. These intricate processes were labor intensive and slow, but the harrowing stories we heard from workers, and the lapses that they revealed in audits used to inspect for labor abuses in China, were not previously reported, and deeply compelling.
As usual, we spent a couple of months engaging hundreds of companies, detailing to them our findings and methodology and asking them questions. All those interactions are published in full on the Discussion Page. We also connected the supply-chain dots between the factories using North Korean workers and the western brands selling their products, which can be seen on our Bait-to-Plate Page. And we summarized the recent revelations on our Findings Page.
Lastly, I will mention that it was a huge honor to work again with the New Yorker. I’d add a big thank you as well to the dozens of foreign news outlets that also partnered with us to publish today’s installment of the investigation. That type of international collaboration is, in my humble opinion, how we in journalism can get a lot more positive impact from investigative projects like this one.