KOREA FOCUS

3. Realities Facing North Korean Workers

 

Marginal work in the labor market and the consequent division of the working class into different income groups constitute the realities of the life of North Korean workers. Against this backdrop, a movement toward capitalism is in progress at the bottom level as labor is sold and bought in a primitive labor market. In the labor market in North Korea in 2009, there are a number of factors that interfere with free competitions for smooth demand and supply. Because of legal and social obstacles, the labor market in North Korea is divided into different sectors and movements between them are very restricted, geographically in particular.

 

The working class in North Korea fully recognizes that money is the best means for their survival and social advancement. As the working class has been stratified in accordance with the scale of personal assets and the level of social networking, desires to move up to higher ladders are growing. With more information about the possibilities of change available, demands for reform and openness are growing stronger among North Korean workers. Socialist cohesion, which once characterized North Korea, is being splintered with the individuals` utilization of their respective social capital as well as their different productivity that has instigated the division of classes in the society of workers.

Most notable in the realities of North Korean workers is the “illegal but socially tolerated” marginal labor. Excluding the employees of military industrial plants, members of core industrial facilities, armed forces personnel and the small percentage of workers reporting to work every day, more than 40 percent of the North Korean working population survives by engaging in marginal labor. Closer observation and more detailed study on their way of living are needed along with analyses on class divisions among North Korean workers. It is also important to note that legal violation and social deviation remarkably differentiate in North Korean labor activities but their conceptual division is quite flexible in terms of social tolerance. Even within major state organizations, illegal labor and marginal working are widely tolerated. Social judgment on some kinds of unorthodox work has rapidly changed in accordance with the shifting conditions of absolute and relative crises in the national economy.

 

[ Korean Political Science Association Journal Vol. 43, No. 3, September 2009 ]