The Socialist Patriotic Youth League has ordered immediate investigations and forced labor punishments for members skipping assigned work to pursue personal business in Wonsan’s tourist zone.
“With reports flooding in of young people — the key workforce to operate the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Area — showing up to work only on paper, with many engaged in private money-making trades as ‘8.3 workers,’ the KSYL’s central committee ordered an immediate investigation of the situation, calling it a ‘dangerous trend caused by the guidance agency’s negligence,’” a Daily NK source in Kangwon province said recently.
According to the source, the KSYL’s central committee — acting through the league’s Kangwon province branch — ordered its Wonsan branch to file detailed reports on the league members’ work attendance, participation in organizational activities and performance of social tasks. “Pursuit of personal profit by shirking one’s organization, using economic distress as an excuse, must never be tolerated as it is a departure from the revolutionary ranks,” it said.
The KSYL’s central committee ordered its local chapter to ferret out all members who have not shown up for work or participated in organizational activities for over a year.
Accordingly, the KSYL’s Wonsan branch reported that many of those absent from their workplaces were in their mid-20s, most had participated in organizational activities just once or twice perfunctorily, and some had not participated for years.
In fact, in the Wonsan Kalma Coastal Tourist Area, the number of young people who make money by getting up early to move goods by bicycle or taxi people by motorcycle has noticeably risen.
Young workers choose survival over state assignments
Some of these young people make a profession of transporting tourist luggage or delivering food, forgoing their assigned workplaces and organizational activities. “Nowadays, young people in Wonsan clearly believe it’s foolish to show up at your assigned workplace, so much so that they say that showing up to work is a good way to starve to death, and that earning money through private business is the way to survive,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the KSYL’s central committee ordered that young people who shirk work or organizational activities be punished with forced labor — a rather exceptional move — warning that they must no longer get off with simple warnings or training.
Young Wonsan residents who make money through private businesses rather than reporting to their assigned workplaces have reacted indignantly to the order, saying the authorities “can’t catch us all.” However, they are also nervous that the authorities might make them an example.
Wonsan residents have been quite critical, the source said, complaining that the state “simply cracks down on young people without opening paths for them to survive,” and that blindly showing up to one’s assigned workplace “amounts to torture” when workplaces “provide neither rations nor salaries.”
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