Kaesong Workers Recoup Stolen Wages on the Black Market
With all the questions about how much pay Kaesong workers actually collect, we’ve always suspected that their earnings must be far more than most of their North Korean neighbors. For one thing, the workers are hand-picked loyalists; the regime must want to keep them relatively content. Yet no one really believed that the workers received the “official” wage of around $60 a month, after “voluntary” deductions and the bite of the inflated official exchange rate.
I figured it was just a matter of time before the Daily NK told us the real deal, and finally, we have a few answers. As suspected, the regime gets almost all of the cash. The workers receive ration stamps, or “commodity provision tickets,” which convey the right to buy scarce food items and consumer goods at special shops for “official” prices. Because those prices are much lower than ordinary black-market rates, Kaesong workers then score a tidy profit reselling what they don’t consume.
Currently, the official salary for laborers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex is around 60 USD, a small amount of which is distributed as cash and the rest in the form of “commodity provision tickets.
In the Kaesong Industrial Complex, there are several shops that can only be frequented by Kaesong laborers and the prices at these stores are at inexpensive compared to prices in the jangmadang. Laborers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex use their “commodity tickets” to purchase products at a cheap price and can make a huge profit by selling the goods, giving the difference to middlemen (currency traders who mediate deals).
Recently, there have even been cases where the middlemen had specific orders for certain items from the Kaesong laborers, asking them to procure a certain amount of rice, oil, and so on. The middlemen can easily make an exorbitant amount of money by selling these goods at the jangmadang. Kim also said, “Among the laborers at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, there are a lot of people who take an item here and there. Then they conspire with bus drivers and hide the goods in the vicinity; once the quantity is fixed, they hand over the goods to middlemen in exchange for money. [Daily NK]
No wonder North Korean workers pay hefty bribes to score jobs there — sure, the workers are exploited, but this is a far more privileged form of exploitation than they’re used to. If North Korea itself is a vast prison, Kaesong sounds like the prison laundry.
Kaesong also turns out to be something of a laboratory in capitalism after all, though not exactly in the way its South Korean designers must have intended. And while the North Korean authorities probably either designed or choose to overlook this de facto marketization, they may be less pleased if the workers are exposed to South Korean consumer goods, or the abundance in the chow line at lunchtime.
At the same time, some of our worst suspicions are confirmed: we have no idea how Kim Jong Il is spending all that cash, and if the workers are essentially paid in food and have no say in the terms of their employment, how are they not slaves?