A joint task force from the ruling party and Cabinet will monitor South Hwanghae province farms until early next year to assess the effectiveness of amended labor law requiring cash payments instead of in-kind distributions.
A source in South Hwanghae province told Daily NK recently that “a guidance and supervision team composed of about 20 personnel from the Central Committee and Cabinet was dispatched to farms in three counties, including Samcheon county, to determine how the Labor Wages Act was being implemented.”
The task force will stay at local farms until early next year to record how harvests were being distributed between the state quota and individual farmers, as well as the responses of farm workers, and to report their findings to the Central Committee and Cabinet.
The on-site inspections are a sort of trial program by the Workers’ Party to gauge the impact of the amended Labor Wages Act. People on the ground say the inspection is the “first exam to demonstrate the effectiveness” of the legislation, given that this year’s amendment specifies that farmers’ shares be given only in cash, not kind.
Accordingly, farms in Samchon county, one of the districts chosen for the trial inspections, are unusually nervous and busy.
Farm workers embrace cash payments as “tangible benefit”
“On the farms, cash is distributed based on calculations of the farmers’ work, and they are pretty happy about receiving cash instead of the rice, beans, corn and other crops they used to receive in past years,” the source said.
In the past, farmers could buy the things they needed only by selling the share they received in kind, but now, they can consume and do business much more freely since they receive cash.
Farm workers are reacting positively to the change, saying that “even farm villages now know what it’s like to have money” and that they “tangibly feel the benefits of the party as they are paid in cash commensurate with their work.”
“The joint team spends every evening in the farm meeting room inspecting whether cash payments were accurately paid and recording any irrationalities or delays they discover,” the source said. “The task force include personnel not only from the Cabinet’s Ministry of Agriculture but also from the Central Committee, so farm officials are very nervous — they say it’s not only a simple administrative inspection, but a political one.”
According to the source, North Korea considers the legal mandate for farms to pay their workers in cash to be the “first step in agricultural reform.” The authorities are trying to stimulate farm workers’ desire to produce by pushing the construction of new farmhouses for free distribution to farm workers alongside the legislative move to mandate cash payments.
“Cash payments are not a mere change in the share system, but a symbolic measure newly defining the state of agricultural communities within the regime,” the source said. “Based on the results from the trial farms, the government plans a full-scale expansion of the cash payment system to all farms nationwide from next year.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: dailynk.com
