俄罗斯的朝鲜“奴隶”劳工 | 双语
James Hill for The New York Times
上月，往返于朝鲜和俄罗斯之间的一艘新渡轮抵达符拉迪沃斯托克。渡轮服务是在当地企业开始雇用朝鲜廉价工人时出现的。
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia — Across Western Europe and the United States, immigrants from poorer countries, whether plumbers from Poland or farmhands from Mexico, have become a lightning rod for economic anxieties over cheap labor.
俄罗斯符拉迪沃斯托克——在西欧和美国各地，从相对贫穷的国家而来的移民，不论是来自波兰的管道工，还是来自墨西哥的雇农，都已经成为由廉价劳动力引发的经济焦虑的引雷针。
The Russian city of Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, however, has eagerly embraced a new icon of border-crushing globalization: the North Korean painter.
不过，符拉迪沃斯托克这座太平洋岸畔的俄罗斯城市，正急切地张开双臂欢迎碾压国境线的全球化大潮中的新偶像：朝鲜油漆工。
Unlike migrant workers in much of the West, destitute decorators from North Korea are so welcome that they have helped make Russia at least the equal of China — Pyongyang’s main backer — as the world’s biggest user of labor from the impoverished yet nuclear-armed country.
与西方世界的很多移民工人不同，来自贫困但却拥有核武器的朝鲜的贫穷粉刷匠非常受欢迎。俄罗斯能成为至少可以和平壤的主要支持者中国平起平坐的朝鲜劳动力最大使用国，他们功不可没。
“They are fast, cheap and very reliable, much better than Russian workers,” Yulia Kravchenko, a 32-year-old Vladivostok homemaker, said of the painters. “They do nothing but work from morning until late at night.”
“他们手脚麻利、便宜，而且非常可靠，比俄罗斯工人好多了，”现年32岁的符拉迪沃斯托克家庭主妇尤利亚·克拉维琴科谈及这些油漆工时说。“从早上到深夜，他们一门心思努力工作。”
The work habits that delight Vladivostok homeowners are also generating sorely needed cash for the world’s most isolated regime, a hereditary dictatorship in Pyongyang closing in on a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States. Just last week, the North reached a milestone by testing its first intercontinental ballistic missile.
让符拉迪沃斯托克的屋主们笑逐颜开的工作习惯，也正转换成世界上最孤立的政权——越来越接近于拥有射程可抵美国的核武器的平壤世袭独裁政府——所急需的现金。就在上周，朝鲜抵达了一个里程碑，试射了自己的首枚洲际弹道导弹。
Squeezed by international sanctions and unable to produce many goods that anyone outside North Korea wants to buy — other than missile parts, textiles, coal and mushrooms — the government has sent tens of thousands of its impoverished citizens to cities and towns across the former Soviet Union to earn money for the state.
朝鲜受国际制裁钳制，无法生产国境以外的民众想要购买的很多产品——除了导弹部件、纺织品、煤炭和蘑菇——因此政府把数以万计的贫穷国民派往前苏联各地的城镇，去为国家赚钱。
Human rights groups say this state-controlled traffic amounts to a slave trade, but so desperate are conditions in North Korea that laborers often pay bribes to get sent to Russia.
人权团体称，这种受控于国家的人员流动与奴隶贸易没太大差别，但由于朝鲜国内的情况太过令人绝望，劳工常常为了能被派往俄罗斯而行贿。
North Korean laborers helped build a new soccer stadium in St. Petersburg to be used in next year’s World Cup, a project on which at least one of them died. They are working on a luxury apartment complex in central Moscow, where two North Koreans were found dead last month in a squalid hostel near the construction site. They also cut down trees in remote logging encampments in the Russian Far East that resemble Stalin-era prison camps.
朝鲜劳工帮助在圣彼得堡建造了一个明年世界杯期间用得上的新足球场，他们中至少有一个人死于该项目。他们目前正建造位于莫斯科市中心的豪华公寓楼，上月有两名朝鲜人被发现死在工地附近一处肮脏的宿舍里。他们还在俄罗斯远东地区类似斯大林时代劳改营的偏远伐木营地里砍伐树木。
But they have left their biggest and most visible mark in Vladivostok, providing labor to home repair companies that boast to customers how North Koreans are cheaper, more disciplined and more sober than native Russians.
但他们通过为家居维修公司提供劳务，在符拉迪沃斯托克留下了最大也最显著的印记。那些公司会向客户吹嘘朝鲜人与俄罗斯本地人相比有多便宜、守纪律、头脑清醒。
James Hill for The New York Times
符拉迪沃斯托克的一家名叫“平壤”的餐厅。
“Surprisingly, these people are hardworking and orderly. They will not take long rests from work, go on frequent cigarette breaks or shirk their duties,” promised the website of a Vladivostok company.
“这些人令人意想不到地勤勉有序。他们不会在工作期间长时间休息，不会频繁地跑出去吸烟，也不会推卸责任，”符拉迪沃斯托克的一家公司在网站上如此承诺。
The home repair industry stands at the more benign end of North Korea’s labor export program. Painters and plasterers are not generally subjected to the brutal mistreatment endured by North Koreans working in Russian logging camps or on construction sites.
家居维修行业在朝鲜的劳务出口计划中占据着待遇比较良好的一端。油漆工和抹灰工通常不会像在俄罗斯伐木营地里或建筑工地上工作的朝鲜人那样，遭到野蛮的虐待。
Though rigidly controlled by minders from the Workers’ Party of Korea, the ruling party in Pyongyang, they do not, on the whole, live in what the State Department in its recently released annual report on human trafficking called “credible reports of slave-like conditions of North Koreans working in Russia.”
他们虽然受到出身于本国执政党朝鲜劳动党的监管人的严格控制，但整体而言，其生活与美国国务院在最近发布的人口贩卖状况年度报告中的描绘并不相符，国务院说“有可靠的举报显示，在俄罗斯工作的朝鲜人过着奴隶般的生活”。
All the same, they still suffer from what human rights groups say is a particularly egregious feature of Pyongyang’s labor export program: Most of their earnings are confiscated by the state.
即便如此，他们仍然深深受害于人权团体口中平壤劳务出口项目的一个尤为令人震惊的特征：大部分收入都被收归国有。
A lengthy report on North Korean workers in Russia issued last year by the Data Base Center for North Korean Human Rights, a group in Seoul, said the Workers’ Party of Korea seizes 80 percent of the wages earned by forestry workers and at least 30 percent of the salaries paid to laborers working in construction. Further money is taken to cover living expenses, mandatory contributions to a so-called loyalty fund and other “donations.”
首尔人权团体朝鲜人权数据库去年发布长篇报告称，朝鲜劳动党会拿走林业工人80%的工资，以及建筑业劳工至少30%的工资。还有一些钱被额外扣掉，用于支付生活费、强制性供款给所谓的忠诚基金以及进行其他“捐赠”。
This “exploitative structure,” the report said, constitutes “one of the fundamental causes of the North Korean workers’ inhumanly hard labor in Russia.”
报告称，这种“盘剥结构”是“朝鲜工人在俄罗斯从事不人道的艰苦劳动的根本原因之一”。
The human rights group estimated that the North Korean authorities earn at least $120 million a year from laborers sent to Russia, a vital source of income for a family dynasty founded, with Moscow’s backing, by Kim Il Sung in 1948 and now headed by his 33-year-old grandson, Kim Jong Un. It put the number of North Koreans working in Russia at nearly 50,000, though other studies say the number is 30,000 to 40,000, which is still more than in China or the Middle East, the other principal destinations.
据朝鲜人权数据库估计，朝鲜当局每年可以从被派往俄罗斯的劳工身上赚取至少1.2亿美元，这对金家王朝来说是一个重要的收入来源。朝鲜政权于1948年由金正日在莫斯科支持下创立，现在的掌舵者是他的孙子、现年33岁的金正恩。该团体认为共有近5万朝鲜人在俄罗斯工作，不过另有研究显示人数在3万至4万之间，这仍然多于别的主要目的地的朝鲜工人数量，不管是中国或中东。
The Russian boss of a Vladivostok decorating company that employs scores of North Koreans said the amount of money seized from salaries had increased substantially over the past decade, rising to a current monthly rate of 50,000 rubles, or $841, from 17,000 rubles a month in 2006. He said his highest-paid workers now lose half or more of their monthly salary through confiscation, while the leader of each construction squad of around 20 to 30 laborers takes an additional cut of about 20 percent in return for finding painting jobs for his men.
符拉迪沃斯托克一家雇用了很多朝鲜人的装修公司的俄罗斯老板说，过去十年间，从工资中被拿走的数额大幅增长，从2006年的每月17000卢布增至当前的每月50000卢布（约合841美元）。他说他手下赚得最多的工人会因收入被充公而损失月薪的一半甚至更多，与此同时，每支由二三十名劳工组成的建筑队的头头，都会向队里的人额外收取约20%的费用，作为帮他们找油漆工工作的回报。
The Russian asked that he not be identified because he feared that Workers’ Party supervisors would punish his laborers or prevent them from working with him.
这个俄罗斯人要求匿名，因为担心劳动党监管人会惩罚他手下的劳工，或阻止他们为他工作。
The increased rate of confiscation followed a sharp fall in the value of the ruble against the dollar, a troubling development for a regime that wants dollars, not rubles.
充公数额不断提高发生在卢布对美元骤然贬值后——对一个想要美元而非卢布的政权来说，卢布贬值是很糟糕的事情。
But the jacking up of the amount of rubles seized more than compensated for the ruble’s fall, reflecting Pyongyang’s desperate hunt for more cash since Kim Jong Un took power in December 2011 and ramped up North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.
不过，充公卢布数额的猛增，超过了弥补卢布贬值所需的幅度，这反映出自金正恩于2011年12月上台并快速推进朝鲜的核项目和导弹项目以来，平壤当局对更多现金的极度渴望。
International sanctions and a Chinese ban on imports of North Korean coal in February after a series of missile tests have steadily squeezed Pyongyang’s other sources of foreign revenue. That has left the export of labor, along with a string of state-run restaurants and other small businesses in Vladivostok and elsewhere, as one of the regime’s shrinking list of ways to generate hard currency.
国际制裁以及中国在朝鲜开展一系列导弹试验后出台的暂停进口其煤炭的禁令，逐渐挤压着平壤的其他海外收入来源。这让劳务出口，还有大量设在符拉迪沃斯托克以及其他地方的国有餐厅等小企业，成了平壤政权手上越来越少的用于获取硬通货的工具之一。
James Hill for The New York Times
上月，俄罗斯符拉迪沃斯托克，一名被唤作迪马(Dima)的朝鲜工人在修郊区的一处房屋期间稍事休息。
The Russian boss said North Koreans work “crazily long hours” without complaint and call him at 6 a.m., even on weekends, if he has not yet shown up to tell them what to paint or plaster. “They don’t take holidays. They eat, work and sleep and nothing else. And they don’t sleep much,” he said. “They are basically in the situation of slaves.”
前述俄罗斯老板称，朝鲜人会毫无怨言地工作“极长时间”，如果他到了早上6点尚未现身并告知该给什么东西刷漆和抹灰，他们就会给他打电话，哪怕是周末也不例外。“他们不放假。他们的生活里只有吃饭、工作和睡觉。而且他们睡得不多，”他说。“他们的状态基本上就像奴隶。”
All the same, he added, North Koreans still want to work in Russia, where, despite the hardships and confiscation of a big chunk of their wages, they can live better and freer than they do at home.
不过他补充说，朝鲜人还是乐于来俄罗斯工作，在这里尽管很辛苦，而且工资中的很大一部分会被充公，但比起在国内，他们可以生活得更好，更自由。
“It is not slave labor but hard labor. And it is much better here than in North Korea,” Georgy Toloraya, a former Russian diplomat in Pyongyang, said.
“他们不是奴工，而是苦工。而且这里的生活比朝鲜好得多，”前俄罗斯驻平壤外交官多格奥尔基·托洛拉亚说。
作者：ANDREW HIGGINS
翻译：纽约时报中文网
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