The Korea Times ran a piece on the debate over whether the Kaesong Industrial Park represents South Korean collusion in human rights abuses in North Korea. Read it on your own.
My own feelings on Kaesong are, well, mixed. Given my libertarian leanings, red flags usually go up anytime I hear people complaining about the exploitation of Third World workers. For all I know, what the Ministry of Unification says about worker conditions at the complex may be true–even though workers in Kaesong may be making no more than one-tenth of what they’d make in the South, it’s probably a lot more than they’d make anywhere else in North Korea, and to the extent that North Korea has any competitive advantage at all, it’s probably its cheap labor.
At the same time, I start to wonder when I read papers like the Hankyoreh making arguments like this. Not exactly what you’d expect from a bastion of progressivism. This, combined with the government’s “encouragement” of firms to set up shop in Kaesong make it pretty clear that like with most investments in North Korea, the object is not to improve South Korea’s competitiveness in the global economy, as the government explains, but to pursue geopolitical goals separate from economic logic.
The same kind of criticism can be leveled at the right, which (at the risk of generalizing quite a bit here) has never been particularly squeamish about multinationals taking advantage of cheap labor in developing countries. Of course, that’s one of the things that makes North Korea (and, in a larger sense, the War on Terror) so interesting is the seeming flip-flop in ideological roles: we see leftists who all of a sudden realize the utility of playing nice to dictators to ensure regional stability, and rightists who seem willing to screw regional stability (at least in the short term) to pursue ideological goals (in this case, the spread of democracy). In fact, the only rock of stability on which we can latch appears to be that now, like then, the left seems to back the anti-American side. Not criticizing or condemning either one here; just making an observation.
Which brings me back to the Kaesong project. Recently, I’ve gotten the strong feeling that South Korean investment is not, as the government explains, driven by the desire to boost the North’s economy in order to promote peaceful unification. But at the same time, it might not be driven, as some critics would allege, by the desire to keep North Korea on life-support to permanently put off unification. It seems to me–and this, I warn, is more of a gut-instinct than an observation based on anything factual (more of using my blog to think out loud)–that the South Korean government knows deep-down that the North is doomed, and its investments represent “flags on the ground,” so to speak. The Chinese are doing the same thing, with investments in ports, mining and infrastructure that appear more geopolitical than economic in nature. It’s all got a very late-19th century feel to it, with the South Koreans and Chinese establishing their “spheres of influence” for the time when the North goes belly-up and the scramble to control what’s left is on.
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I’m halfway through reading the post above and can already smell the roasted marmot meat.
Can’t make everyone happy, I guess.
Kim Jong Il = Tony Soprano
Kaesong = Barone Sanitation
Kaesong is a complicated issue in large part because of its opacity. The S.K. gov’t is not too forthcoming about how the North selects the workers and what happens with the money they’re paid. We don’t know if they have any kind of health insurance through these companies, or pensions, or really anything about the terms of their employment.
From what I can gather they are paid $57 a month for working 48 hours a week. Seoul has defended this pittance of a salary by saying it is better than“other socialist countries,”by which it must not mean Sweden. They have been balking at letting in an international group to investigate conditions in Kaesong, and are not inviting companies from other countries to set up there. It really looks like pigs at the trough and short-term exploitation by the South, given that its small revenue for the North.
I think Marnmot you’re right about S.K. “marking the territory” while China does the same, and at the same time at least trying to hold off the North’s collapse with Kaesong (and free rice and payoffs for the reunions, tourism, etc.).
S.K. has nowhere near the influence China has over N.K. and can’t offer the N.K. regime the protection the Chinese can, so without internationalizing Kaesong, getting other nations involved and running it in a transparent manner, China will win out in the end.
Although the $57.50 figure has been widely reported, the intrepid Barbara Demick of the LA Times, allowed into Kaesong during a recent group visit for journalists, learned that the workers actually make a fraction of that — just $8 a month or a nickel an hour — after “voluntary” payments are deducted.
That being said, it’s still true that Kaesong workers do better than other North Korean workers (as of last summer, 1/3 of North Koreans depended on international food aid to survive; the aid has since stopped). That said, you have to see the issue in the context of the greater issue of North Korean working and living condtions — to the extent we can even know what they are — to see what makes Kaesong different than, say, a Honduran sweatshop.
First, at Kaesong, there are no free labor markets — no semblance of a right to organize or bargain collectively and no choice to work somewhere else. Admittedly, those rights are probably restricted in plenty of other places with which we do business, but not to a remotely similar degree.
Second, consider how much worse off most North Korean workers are at places other than Kaesong, and ask yourself how Kaesong impacts that. If Kaesong were in fact likely to mean that in the long run, a labor market would develop to improve workers’ wages and working conditions, I might not object to it in principle. If Kaesong is really a harbinger of reform, even a small improvement in transparency could outweigh the disadvantage of giving the regime more money to buy arms and oppress its people. If not, Kaesong squanders international economic pressure that could be used to help ease the suffering of its people, get food into the bellies of the hungry, and get the artillery away from the DMZ.
Unfortunately, the consensus of the reports from the last group visit is that the regime remains determined to keep the information blockade in place at Kaesong and everywhere else. Minders were everywhere, no contact with the workers was permitted, and the South Korean managers were also kept at a distance from the workers. I’m not sure that isolation will necessarily prove effective in the long run, but if not, the regime will just clamp down. The North Koreans view Kaesong as a cash cow that they won’t permit to affect the greater system, other than to help preserve it. Reform? They see Nicky Ceausescu in their dreams. That’s also consistent recent reports that even the halting economic reforms North Korea announced in 2002 have been reversed.
One final thought — I think Robert correctly pegs one of South Korea’s hidden motives, which is the fear of excessive Chinese economic influence (another being a simple profit motive). But if South Korea were less deferential to China, it might simply state that obligations incurred by an illegitimate and oppressive regime will not be honored by a future government, per the doctrine of “odious debt.”