The Marmot’s Hole

…but the workers there are still getting ripped off and Seoul is still funding Pyongyang’s ”military first” habit. 

Everyone’s favorite British sap visionary banker in Pyongyang must be a happy guy right now.  He just avoided having a little competition (Yonhap):

North Korea sought to open an account with a South Korean bank at an inter-Korean industrial complex in its border town of Kaesong* last year, but the South Korean bank rejected the request, officials at the Unification Ministry said Tuesday.

There was another bit in the piece that I found interesting:

“The North said it wished to open an account at the Woori Bank branch in Kaesong and collect the wages of its workers at the industrial complex through the account,” [Ministry of Unification official] Goh said.

So the workers are not paid directly by their employers.  Instead the North Korean government gets all the money.  If that is the case, I would like to think that someone in the Ministry of Anti-Unification is in charge of making sure the workers actually get all their money.  If anyone knows more about this I would love to hear it.

The piece ends with an inadvertent truth:

A number of U.S. officials, including Jay Lefkowitz, a special envoy for North Korean human rights, have expressed concerns over possible violations of the North Korean workers’ human rights there and the diversion of their wages to help the North’s weapons program.

Seoul dismisses the concerns, saying the amount of money paid in wages is insignificant even for the impoverished North.

About $600,000, in U.S. dollars, are paid each month to North Korean workers there, whose minimum monthly wage is set at $57, according to Goh.

The joint industrial complex is expected to house some 2,000 South Korean firms, employing as many as half a million North Koreans, when it is in full swing in 2012, according to the Unification Ministry.

There are currently 8,000 North Korean workers in Gaeseong earning that $600,000 per month for Pyongyang**.  The Ministiry of Anti-Unification says that amount is too small to make much difference in Pyongyang’s weapon’s programs.  However, a few paragraphs later we find that the plan is for there to up to 500,000 North Korean workers in Gaeseong by 2012. 

Let’s to the math (8,000/600,000 = 500,000/X).  That comes out to $37.5 million a month or $450,000,000 a year.  You can buy a lot of mustard gas and Scud parts with that kind of change.

The piece is basically saying “we are not funding North Korea’s military but give us enough time and we will.”

Lovely.

*Does anyone find it interesting that the South Korean official news agency is using the Nork spelling of Gaeseong?

**Anyone who tries to tell you that the workers at Gaeseong are really making $57.50 a month either does not know what he is talking about or is trying to blow smoke up your backside.  They actually make closer to $2 a month:

At Kaesong, workers are not hired directly; instead they are hired through a North Korean government agency, which, according to South Korean government sources, retains $22.50 of a worker’s $57.50 monthly pay to cover social security payments, transportation, and other in-kind benefits.  However, while South Korean firms pay in hard currency, North Korea pays the workers in North Korean won converted at the wildly overvalued official exchange rate. Evaluated at the more realistic black-market rate, North Korean workers net less than $2 per month. The real problem is that while conditions in Kaesong may be exploitative, they probably are considerably better than those existing elsewhere in North Korea, and there may be no shortage of North Koreans willing to work on these terms.