The Russian city of Orenburg failed to attract street sweepers from North Korea, after the workers deemed the offered wages too low. This was announced by Mayor Albert Yumadilov, summarizing the preliminary results of a program to hire foreign workers for housing and utilities, according to kommersant.ru.
Yumadilov stated that last year he tried to negotiate the hiring of North Koreans for street cleaning, but he was unsuccessful.
“Workers from North Korea do not want to pay for 55,000 rubles. The salaries there are two or three times higher,” an official told the local publication 1743.ru. “Of course, they are more efficient, they work like robots. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, they really are robots… But we simply cannot afford the salaries.”
In the meantime, the residents of Orenburg are satisfied with the work of the recently arrived migrants from Senegal.
“They work on Sunday. Before, nobody worked on Sunday! And nobody worked on Saturday… If we were to purchase this, ordering it from contractors, it would cost us about three million. But we have 20 people like them working there and doing a good job”, the mayor noted.
In April, Albert Yumadilov reported that 70 workers from Senegal will be brought to Orenburg to clean the streets. He mentioned that it was difficult to find Russian-speaking workers willing to sort through mountains of garbage, Kommersant-Volga reported. An agreement with Senegalese street cleaners was planned to be concluded by April 2027.