You have to love the annual reviews over at the National Assembly. They almost always unearth interesting tidbits.
For example, we already knew that Gaeseong workers are getting ripped off to help fund Pyongyang’s regime and keep Kim Jong-il’s cognac flowing. Now we know it is even worse than we thought:
More than half the salaries paid to North Koreans working at the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Park go to the North Korean Workers’ Party, a document written by a team in charge of inter-Korean economic cooperation at the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy shows. The team reported to the unification minister.
Grand National Party lawmaker Kim Gi-hyeon made the document public on Sunday. According to the memo, US$30 out of the monthly pay of $57.50 goes to the Workers’ Party. With $17.50 spent on insurance and other costs, North Korean workers at the complex are left with only $10 a month.
Interestingly enough, the boys over at the Ministry of Unifiction apparently don’t read their own memos:
A Unification Ministry official on Sunday denied the report. “It is the first I’ve heard about $30 going to the party,” he said. “How could the Industry Ministry know about something that the Unification Ministry didn’t know?”
Well, pulling your heads out of your asses* might help.
That memo jives with this report from the Standard:
The monthly salaries of US$57.50 for each North Korean worker - regardless of position - are paid directly to the North Korean government, which in turn gives the workers about US$8, more than double the average monthly salary. South Korean companies have asked repeatedly to pay the workers directly and to give bonuses for better work, but have been refused.
You read that correctly. The companies in Gaeseong pay Pyongyang, not the workers, in dollars. The NK government in turn pockets the dollars and pays the workers in overvalued North Korean won (so the workers actually get even less than $10 a month).
A simple way for everyone to know exactly how much the workers at Gaeseong are making is to have the companies pay them directly. Considering that the South is taking all the financial risks, it is not too much to ask.
*The is my first bit of naughty language here. I guess the Marmot is having too strong an influence on me.
30 Comments
But a key point is that even though the workers are definitely getting the shaft in respect of the portion of wages ending up in their pockets, eight dollars a month is still a big-time salary in North Korea. Those jobs are coveted — it would not be at all surprising to learn that of the eight dollars, some bribe must be paid to a North Korean “broker” who introduces workers to the opportunity for such a handsome wage.
Has anyone seen any official statements of what the DPRK workers are actually given in North Korean money? Everyone’s talking about dollars that the North Koreans workers never see, remaining in the possession of DPRK authorities. Daily NK has a report from last May telling that the Kaesong workers are paid 6000 won. How much that is in dollars depends of course on the exchange rate in question, official or black-market. According to a Daily NK piece from Oct 19, 2006, the official rate is 143 DPRK won to $1, and the black market rate 3000 won to $1. The professor cited in the latter article maintains, by the way, that while the average industrial wage in DPRK is 3-4000 won, in some “foreign currency earning” fatories around Pyongyang the wages might be as high as 20-30 000 won.
Union dues certainly are steep nowadays.
Meanwhile, Stateside:
Social Security Tax (for “social security” that I’ve never ever see, thanks to the feddle gummint’s fiscal mismanagement and the baby boomer crisis)
Medicare Tax, swelling ranks of the AARP; ie. see above reference to “baby boomer”.
Medicaid Tax, Mexicans (illegal)
Federal Tax, Iraq War, Bush, Terr-ism
State Tax, budget deficit, NJ thinking about selling Turnpike
Local tax, traffic mess
Property Tax, the Great Real Estate Bubble of 2003-2005,
State-mandated liability insurance, registration fees, license fees, inspection fees, FAA communication fees, inter-state fees, miscellaneous fees, more miscellaneous fees.
Holy Shit! Where did like 40% of my salary go????
Bluejives, you forgot the sales tax, also the estate tax (which may or might be phased out), also the capital gains tax and don’t forget the indirect alcohol and cigarette taxes. Oh yeah, the soon to be introduced California pollution tax. Excessive tipping which is basically a service tax. Hmmm . . . and let’s not underestimate fees (taxes) on cable tv, landlines and cellphones. What about the Highway tax and gasoline tax. The Cato Institute estimates that a person in the States making more than 55K a year without deductions pays 60% to 70% of his income in taxes.
Hey, at least the Norks don’t have all these complicated tiers of taxing. The bite is simple–we take everything except eight bucks.
Korea can’t unite anytime soon, even if Kim Jong Il’s regime falls. The South’s economy will be heavily burdened if it were to absorb the North. Thus, even with Kim’s fall, the South would have to give governing power to some North leader who will keep the country going and doing a lot of Kae Sung’s at least for a couple decades. I think Uri is visioning Kim Jong Il to be doing a lot of Kae Sung’s for decades and building itself up back to an “absorbable” economy level. Instead, the incorrigible Kim made a nuke to ensure his status as king of North Korea. It’s quite amazing that a man who lacks physical, mental, and leadership skills can manage to inherit a nation with 1 million active troops and enough weapons to protect it. I think in any other communist society, power struggles replaced Kim’s type, historically.
There’s nothing to buy in North Korea anyway…
Even if companies paid directly, that wouldn’t guarantee that the workers could keep it once they walked out the factory door.
There’s no way to ensure that those workers could keep what they’d be paid.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
… and the Dear Leader will provide.
So the North Koreans also get paid by the month? Is that a Japanese thing? Where’s that nonsense coming from?
WJK, South Korea won’t have any burden concerning North Korea because the way things are going now, China will be the one that installs “KJI 2″ and props up the economy. There’s no evidence that the South has any political influence on the North whatsoever–it’s the opposite in fact.
Wonder if Ban saw the above info before he told Rice that the ROK(well the Uri) will continue on with Kaesong and Kumgang no matter what?
Arbeit macht frei.
Arbeit macht frei.
Neocon’s favored allusions to the nostalgic period of the so-called Greatest Generation and the WWII era is indicative of their general incapability to mentally adapt to the new realities of today. It is also a reason why they may have a tough time distinguishing, for instance, the moral distinction between a Kaesong Project and a freaking Nazi death camp.
North Korea has both a Kaesong project (a low-wage sweatshop) AND more numerous and larger Nazi-style death camps, so there is enough to satisfy both Sunshiners and Neocons.
Work sets you free.
Coreans’ favored allusion to the nostalgic period of the so-called Japanese Empire and the WWII era is indicative of their general incapability to mentally adapt to any reality. It is also a reason why they may have a tough time distinguishing, for instance, the moral distinction between anything in Korea and anything that is moral.
Truth sets you free.
But what is Truth?
Right-wing America’s favored allusions to “morality” and their peculiar proclivity for self-appointment as loud, outspoken, utterly righteous, standard-bearers of “morality” from a land that is otherwise mired in the shifting sands of post-modernist relativity, with most of middle America flocking towards the latest, popular, flavor-of the-month feel-good intuitional spiritualism to escape from their empty lives, citizens constantly bombarded into apathetic submission by a relentless and oft conflicting propaganda mass- produced by special interests driven media machine spinning out of control, warping people’s minds into pretzels, letting absurdity triumph over truth, is indicative of Right-wing America’s desperate and self-deluded grasp for a measure of certainty and control and the incapability of simple minds to comprehend a far more complicated world.
There is no truth in the media…there is no truth in morality.
Truth is inherently immoral, for it only comes from jumping into the trenches, bayonet fixed, charging in a headlong penetration past the front lines of what the media presents, and attacking from the rear at the center of gravity, which is what the media and politicians attempt to defend so fervently.
I agree…truth sets you free.
First we were told, “57.50 a month is a lot of money for a North Korean”, now it’s “8 bucks a month is a lot of money for a North Korean”. What’s next? “They were rewarded with the job because they gave one of their kidneys to the Dear Leader”?
For a government that has propaganda signs facing south along the DMZ in which it claims that North Koreans don’t pay any taxes, it sure is taking a big cut for itself.
Here’s the greatest irony of the anti-Kaesong argument propagated by the Neocon group-think:
The mid-90 NK famine and the horrendous vision of dead bodies filling rivers and starving families forced to eat grass, tree bark, and the corpses of their own children forms the core basis of the Neocon argument of the fundamental illegimacy of the KJI government and the need for regime change.
Now I am no professional economist, but I do know that a nation’s economic viability rests heavily upon trade and exchange with the outside world. NK is no exception. NK, like SK, Japan, and all the rest of East Asia, needs an export-oriented trading infrastructure to have a decent economy. Due to the twist of historical fate and the conflict of the past half-century long Cold War division, NK was left out of that game. Their industry is decrepit, rusting due to neglect and lack of modern technology, and due to the colder Northern climate, indigenous agriculture is incapable of providing self-sufficiency. NK’s many formidable problems today is a legacy-burden directly resulting from the larger Cold War ideological conflict imposed upon most of the world by foreign superpowers during the 20th century.
Now.
What’s past is past. The urgent question is how do we manage current affairs in terms of policy with an eye towards a better future, n’est pas?
Without some kind of a working economy, NK’s rank-and-file citizens cannot eat. But in order to have a working economy, NK must trade with the outside world, starting with her immediate neighbors, at least. NK is not going to build a world-class economy overnight, but her people most definitely have the Confucian work ethic and loads of potential.
The Neocons want to impose sanction upon NK. Sanction is the opposite of trade. Without trade, there is no economy. No economy, no food. People are left to starve.
The moral basis of the Neocon argument for regime change is that the corrupt KJI government is incapable of providing even the most basic needs of their own people and thus must be removed from existence. So their solution is to impose a policy upon that will MAKE SURE that MORE ordinary NK people and children will die due to lack of food, in vague hopes that eventually SOMETHING will happen, and maybe NK will collapse on its own.
In actuality, all worldly governments are corrupt, even that of the eminent United States of America. It’s only a matter of degree and extent. For one nation’s government to decry another nation’s government as “illegitimate” and immoral is ridiculous chutzpah from a divine perspective. The morality lip service is merely a public relations device used to justify/rationalize a certain policy to an unsuspecting public. The reality is that the United States government is not so interested in starving children in NK but are interested in INTERESTS. If the US gov cared so deeply about the plight of starving, poverty, and disease-stricken people, they would have taken over all of sub-saharan Africa ages ago.
The ROK gov may have dealt with NK in less than ideal fashion plenty of times. I most certainly do not doubt that. But if I had to weigh the policy of the ROK gov versus that of the US on the morality scale, the US loses out big time. Basically want the US wants is to remove KJI, using the argument that he cant even feed his own people. So the solution is to implement a policy that is guaranteed to starve off more people and harden the NK elite into a state of heigtened militancy and drastically escalate tensions in NE Asia to the point where even SK is jeopardized?
Chutzpah.
That is one piece of world class sophistry, bluejives, even by your stellar standards.
bluejives wrote:
Meanwhile, Stateside:
Social Security Tax (for “social security” that I’ve never ever see, thanks to the feddle gummint’s fiscal mismanagement and the baby boomer crisis)
Medicare Tax, swelling ranks of the AARP; ie. see above reference to “baby boomer”.
Medicaid Tax, Mexicans (illegal)
Federal Tax, Iraq War, Bush, Terr-ism
State Tax, budget deficit, NJ thinking about selling Turnpike
“Local tax, traffic mess
Property Tax, the Great Real Estate Bubble of 2003-2005,
State-mandated liability insurance, registration fees, license fees, inspection fees, FAA communication fees, inter-state fees, miscellaneous fees, more miscellaneous fees.
Holy Shit! Where did like 40% of my salary go????
Dude, are you posting drunk? Did it myself, no question there, but…huh?
I hope I’m not a Neocon. Sounds like a scary bunch.
Good thinking. No way the ROKG is responsible for helping prolong the suffering of millions or supplying the regime/military with goods the help the oppress the rest.
Do you by chance write for Galactica?
Funny then, bluejives, that the U.S. is the largest donor of food aid to North Korea.
Let me present a dissenting opinion to your bullshit, since I can do that on Marmot’s freely. If we weigh the policy of the ROK gov versus that of the US on the morality scale, the ROK loses out big time. Why? Because it is the ROK that claims it pursues the policy it does because the North Koreans are their “brothers”, being of the same ethnicity at all. Yet, the South Koreans’s policies of appeasement only prolong the misery of the North Korean population, their imprisonment, and their murder. On the other hand, there are not a few people in the U.S. who for some reason would actually like to see fewer North Koreans suffering in concentration camps and for that reason want Kim’s regime to fall. Yet, in South Korea, hardly a word in outrage against the murder of thousands of Koreans in North Korea is heard, despite their supposedly glorious blood ties. And no pressure is put on the North’s government to stop it.
Even in its ethnocentrism, the SK government screws up royally.
“….For one nation’s government [US] to decry another nation’s government [DPRK] as “illegitimate” and immoral is ridiculous chutzpah from a divine perspective. The morality lip service is merely a public relations device used to justify/rationalize a certain policy to an unsuspecting public. The reality is that the United States government is not so interested in starving children in NK but are interested in INTERESTS. If the US gov cared so deeply about the plight of starving, poverty, and disease-stricken people, they would have taken over all of sub-saharan Africa ages ago….”
You’ve convinced me. I’m ready to pull US forces out of Korea right now and send them to Africa, how about we both write our Congressmen with that proposal?
BTW, if I were you I’d avoid using the word “chutzpah” in connection with argument excusing the North Korean government of responsibility for the death of millions of its own citizens.
For some of us, such usage evokes the memory of the similar death of millions of European Jews. It’s definitely a good word to use for your attitude though.
Main Entry: chutz·pah
Function: noun
Variants: also chutz·pa/’hut-sp&, ‘[k]ut-, -(”)spä/
Etymology: Yiddish khutspe, from Late Hebrew huspAh
: supreme self-confidence : NERVE , GALL
synonym see TEMERITY
Do you by chance write for Galactica?
What, as in Battlestar? What the heck are you talking about?
Reply to Doggie:
The US is the biggest food aid donor to North Korea. OK. Allow me this cogitate this piece of information. I’ll admit that I dont know if that is strictly true or not and possibly wouldn’t be so inclined to doubt it either. But frankly, I dont find myself too interested in what the USGOV does with federally subsidized excess grain.
OK, so the US is the biggest food aid donor to North Korea. Big whoop. That’s like me saying that I gave some frozen dinners to the homeless guy down at the shelter. So hand me a cookie and a medal.
Then there’s the matter of consistency. Supposing that it were true. I thought the point was to make NK collapse. I thought we already knew by now that once food aid is given to the NORKs, we dont know how it is really distributed. How is giving the NORKs food aid supposed to make them collapse? So do we want to make NK collapse or no? Which is it?
The U.S. *was* the largest donor of food aid, however I think (not sure) it no longer is, as the U.S. gave through the UN (which monitored food aid), and NK kicked them out. Why? In favor of the *unmonitored* food aid from SK. Go figure.
Giving *monitored* food aid to North Korea would mean that average citizens feel less of the brunt of the other financial and trade sanctions.
The other sanctions target the elite and the military. The idea is that if those two elements begin to face the same hardships as the common citizens, they will not be as loyal to Kim Jong-il and the regime will collapse (e.g., they won’t enforce the rules/regs, etc.).
For example, cutting off remittances, trade, and oil will not affect the common North Korean as they would not be allowed to receive anything from Japan, can’t buy anything, and don’t use vehicles/oil heat anyway – but the elite/military do.
So, that’s part of the rationale for giving monitored food aid, why it doesn’t generally help the elite/military (although some does), and why North Korea rejected UN aid for strings free aid from South Korea (i.e., SK helping prop up KJI).
As for your downplaying of the U.S. giving vast amounts of food to North Korea; doesn’t the cognitive dissonance hurt? Even a little bit? Blurred vision? Nose bleed? Anything?
Dogbertt’s point undermines your earlier argument quite thoroughly, which is probably why you changed topics to “consistency” — but staked out an equally shaky position the way you’ve stated it. But Dogbertt could have been more precise: the US was the biggest donor to the famine relief operations carried out by the WFP from 1995 onward, responsible for about 80 percent of the FUNDS that were given through those channels, during both Clinton and Bush administrations. (Chinese bilateral aid has not been quantified and is not transparent). This is no longer the case, because the US insists on minimal monitoring standards that have been flouted and undermined by North Korea. Last time I checked, only Ireland and Australia have given to the 2006-7 WFP campaign, which remains 90% underfunded.
If you were interested in mounting consistent, cogent arguments — and not the sort of twisted Yankee-baiting that has been your MO for some three years (witness: “That’s like me saying that I gave some frozen dinners to the homeless guy down at the shelter”) — you could look up these things. Three hours even with wikipedia would EXPONENTIALLY raise your game in discussions of these matters.
But (I guess you must be thinking) what fun would being informed and factual be?
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