The Hidden People of North Korea (20 page)

In those workplaces still operating more or less normally, a typical workday starts at 7 a.m., with a half hour of warm-up exercises followed by another half hour of instructions for the day and political study. Workers take an hour for lunch and quit work at 5 p.m.; they are then required to attend political study and self-criticism sessions for one to three hours. Workers must also show up on Saturday for more political study or special labor duties, but they have Saturday afternoons and Sundays off. Workers on collective farms take off every tenth day, which was the traditional Korean market day.

Work hours are extended during “speed battles,” when the authorities try to whip an organization or an entire economic sector into a frenzy in order to complete whatever project the officials in Pyongyang desire. These battle periods, usually lasting several weeks or months, are modeled on the Stakhanovite movement of the Soviet Union. In rhetoric, although not in practice, the speed battles can be extended for years, as in the phrase “speed of the nineties.” In 2009, a countrywide “150-day” battle was waged from May to October. To take an example at the local level, the workers of the Sinuiju Shoes Plant, said to be “permeated with the great general’s immortal leadership achievements,” went all-out to achieve goals set in the 2003 New Year’s Joint Editorial.
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The local party committee organized a “siren-sounding unit” and employed “visual-aid propaganda, oral propaganda, and situation propaganda (
chonghwang sondong
)” to create a work site “seething like a battlefield.” The Sinuiju workers were reminded that the United States was trying to crush their country and that “the bosom of their mother is the very bosom of the great general.” In short, standard practice is for young party members to show up at a work site with red flags (no work site is complete without its red flags), bang drums, shout slogans, and sing songs. To judge by first-hand accounts and economic statistics, the effect of this agitation is fleeting at best.

Work on major construction projects is generally conducted in speed-battle style by unskilled workers, including students and soldiers drafted for the projects. The workers are organized into “shock brigades” that toil up to twelve hours a day with very little food. Work conditions are difficult, and deaths from construction accidents and malnutrition are common. According to an article quoting the “battalion political instructor” of one of these shock brigades, during the three years of construction on facilities at Mt. Paektu, shock brigade members “gathered stones from the beds of rivers where ice was floating,” “dragged huge tree trunks down the mountainsides,” and “transported and supplied almost all the granite and marble needed for the overall construction work.”
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This sounds like a modern-day version of building the pyramids. According to one defector, twenty thousand workers carrying dirt and rocks in sacks on their backs built the Samsu power plant.
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Each day a worker received 580 grams of corn (equivalent to two or three cups, the exact amount depending on whether the distributed corn was cooked or raw), with side dishes of salted bean-paste soup and pickled radishes. On Kim Il-sung’s birthday, each worker received new underwear, a pair of socks, and two bags of cookies.

One of the most famous “youth” construction projects in recent years was the Youth Hero Motorway, a forty-three-kilometer, twelve-lane expressway linking Pyongyang and the port city of Nampo, completed in 1998. To please Kim Jong-il, who is a great fan of the theater, this accomplishment was immortalized in a “light comedy” titled
Youths Shine
, depicting “the lives of the bright and merry youths mixed with tears of laughter and deep emotion.”
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North Korea has hundreds of other such projects, including the Anbyon Youth Power Station, the Jangsongang Youth Power Station, the Unsong Youth Reservoir, and the Hamhung City Youth Goat Farm—all accomplishments of what the North Korean press lauds as “the wisdom and stamina of the youth.”
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A detailed account of worker motivation is provided by a former labor battalion commander of a workers’ shock brigade assigned to construct the high-rise apartments that Kim Jong-il commissioned for Pyongyang in advance of the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students.
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In addition to reporting on the unsafe work conditions (he claimed to have seen statistics showing that an average of one worker died per day during a three-year period of construction), he described how difficult it was to motivate his men. To get to their work sites, the workers first had to climb twenty to thirty flights of stairs. “Upon reaching the top, I would find my men loafing, enjoying the panoramic view of Pyongyang like sparrows perched side by side on a telephone line.… I had no strength to scold them, so I would quietly sit down near them.… Only after I prompted them several times, would they slowly get up and get ready for work. Half an hour passed this way. Some mean fellows still remained sitting, protesting in silence.” Throughout the day they worked only sporadically. “Wherever the regimental commander and the political director went, the mobile propaganda team appeared beforehand with bugles blowing, and the battalion and company commanders barked at their men blowing whistles and pointing their fingers at them. Each tried to show that they were the masters in creating a ‘combat atmosphere.’ ” All that the typical worker could bring home after two years of labor was some saved food-ration coupons, a few biscuits, and such necessities as toothpaste and facial soap obtained from friends or relatives in Pyongyang, where such items are available.

Anecdotal evidence from defectors suggests that job satisfaction in North Korea is low, which is hardly surprising given how little control people have over job selection and how low their wages are. With few material incentives for superior performance, working for the state is drudgery; but then again, until recently that drudgery was all that people knew. Consequently, most of the people, most of the time, do not work hard—not because they are lazy but because they do not have the opportunity to work for themselves in a productive environment. The government launches one campaign after another in a vain attempt to persuade workers to honor the “480-minute” workday as a “sacred duty” and to think of their time “like combat hours at a decisive battlefield.”
¹⁰

Kim Jong-il seems to hope that eventually the North Korean people can be made to love labor for its own sake, motivated only by political and moral incentives, thereby making it possible to dispense with the need to provide them with any material incentives. The press is filled with calls for officials to “properly conduct labor education so that the working people will love to work, participate in social labor voluntarily and faithfully, and thoroughly abide by socialist labor life norms and the labor discipline.”
¹¹
But Kim, and presumably everyone else in North Korea, realizes that socialist motivation alone will not run the country. The official explanation of the continued need for material incentives is that socialist society is in transition, still burdened by the bad habits and outmoded thoughts of the old capitalist society—not that many North Koreans ever had the opportunity to be capitalists.

The North Korean press claims that in a theoretical work dating from the 1960s, Kim Jong-il “completely elucidates the directions and methods necessary to realize the political and moral incentive and the material incentive,” thereby providing “a theoretical weapon which we should persistently maintain throughout the entire course of socialist construction.”
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But Kim has only offered the notion that political and moral incentives should always take precedence over material incentives, and this remains the official doctrine.
¹³
That said, on Kim’s recommendation labor administrators have tried to boost the role of material incentives since the advent of the July 2002 economic measures, even while articles in the press continue to stress the primacy of political and moral incentives. Workers are told they are the “masters of the society and the economy,” and thus “the material and cultural wealth created in the socialist society is absolutely the property of the masses of people, and used for their independent and creative lives.”
¹⁴
In the 1950s and 1960s, most North Koreans truly believed they were building a prosperous state and would soon be living in a socialist paradise, and every year their lives improved. But today, after several decades of economic decline, and seeing before them the corruption of party officials, the people largely discount political and moral incentives.

Another aspect of work motivation that has received much attention in the North Korean press since July 2002 is the matter of “socialist distribution.” Those who know communism from the textbooks will be familiar with the precept “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Instead, in today’s North Korea people are told, “Those who have contributed more to the society and the group receive more material incentives and proper political assessments suitable for their achievements.”
¹⁵
Now the problem for the bankrupt state is to find resources with which to reward top performers.

As one can imagine, when people are assigned to jobs they have not chosen for themselves, and when their efforts are not materially rewarded, they use whatever extra energy they have to pursue sideline occupations such as tending a vegetable garden, raising chickens, or trading in the local market. Since the mid-1990s, sideline employment has become an economic necessity as the availability of goods in the PDS declines and state wages can hardly buy anything at the markets. Time spent at the office or the factory is time wasted.

Working for Oneself

North Korean propaganda organs teach that if people are boundlessly loyal to the party and the leader, they can even “grow flowers on rocks if the party wishes them to.”
¹⁶
It turns out that people who ignore the party line and go to work for themselves are the ones who can perform economic miracles. Yet, even though most factories are not operating and the distribution system is bankrupt, people are still supposed to show up for work.

A partial exception to this work regime is the case of women, who, as mentioned earlier, are less likely than men to be assigned full-time jobs. Thus, they have more opportunity to work outside the socialist economy as small traders and merchants, selling household goods and homemade articles. Women also take jobs as waitresses or maids (because householders in a communist economy are not supposed to have servants, employers may introduce their maids as “distant relatives”). Some women become mistresses of the newly rich, and others engage in prostitution.

In the absence of a functioning domestic manufacturing sector, most of the goods in the market are imported from China by big traders, who then export North Korean antiques, narcotics, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and natural resources such as ginseng, mushrooms, and herbal medicine. Traders who work for themselves must have access to hard currency, usually through family connections in China or Japan. Other traders work for state, party, and military organizations, who enlist their own employees or hire outsiders to purchase manufacturing resources and food for the organization. If an organization hires a trader or manager who provides his own operating capital, he is registered as an “honorary” employee and pays the organization a portion of the profits. Traders, whether they work for themselves or for an organization, also end up paying a sizeable portion of their profits as bribes to border guards and security personnel who intercept deliveries along the way. Whatever the trading or business endeavor, the important principle for earning money is to keep one step ahead of the competition—and the police—by discovering new businesses or new ways to do business.

To get out of their useless job assignments, men often buy out their work contracts, so to speak, by paying the workplace management a nominal fee to keep their absence from being recorded. Some organizations that have no work for their employees simply permit workers to sign in for work in the morning and then go out and produce something of value for the organization, such as homemade consumer goods. Workers are even permitted by their workplace managers (but not by the central government) to sell the organization’s assets, such as machinery salvaged from a factory that is no longer operating. The most notorious case of factory-stripping occurred at the Hwanghae Steel Mill, where, according to what Kim Jong-il told members of a visiting delegation from Japan’s North Korea organization, “Some bad elements of our society in cahoots with the mill management began to dismantle the mill and sell its machines as scrap metal to Chinese merchants.… [The bad elements] bought out party leaders and security officers, and consequently, no one had informed us about their thievery. Everybody was on the take at the mill and we had to send in the army to retake it.”
¹⁷

Even those who do not engage in marketing or trading as a full-time business have become part-time small-scale merchants and traders, producing handmade goods at home, growing vegetables, collecting firewood to sell on the street or at the market, or buying goods in one place and selling them in another. For example, cheap consumer goods purchased in China or along the border are transported in bundles to the southern part of the country, rice grown in the south is sold in the north, and fish from the seashore is sold inland. There is no evidence that the economy is actually producing more goods (other than homemade goods); rather, more people are trying their hand at trading.

Selling goods in a local market is a popular way to make money. Almost anything can be purchased there, although most vendors sell inexpensive articles such as soap and homemade food. The markets also attract criminals, including the
kotchebi
, or “swallows”—orphaned children who work alone or in small gangs picking pockets and swiping bags and merchandise.