The two previous articles:
- Part 1, where I describe the insane lengths to which North Korea goes to pretend like it's a rich prosperous country to foreign visitors and tourists, even though everybody knows it's all just a huge facade and acted show.
- Part 2, where I describe the North Korean concentration camps, and how insane that system is, outright resembling a dystopian sci-fi story.
Of course North Korea's weirdness does not end there. Let's take, for example, the huge dilapidated factories that are completely broken down and can't produce anything, but where every day thousands of people still pretend to work at, doing absolutely nothing, because they are forced to.
And no, that's not some people trying to defraud the government to get a salary while actually doing nothing. They are doing it because the government forces them to, and are not doing it willingly.
You see, all the way back during the early years of the first Supreme Leader, Kim Il Sung (ie. some years after the second World War), North Korea adopted a very Soviet-style form of economy, where every single citizen is provided a job by the government, in exchange for the government also providing them a complimentary home, food and a monetary allowance for everyday expenses.
And just like in the Soviet Union, refusing to work was illegal and would easily land you in one of those concentration camps (although North Korea made this even stricter than the Soviet Union ever did.)
This system worked surprisingly well for several decades, and in fact for quite a while North Korea was much richer than South Korea of the time was (before this wealth status made a complete swap some time in the era from about the 70's to the 90's).
However, some time in the mid-90's things changed, and the economy of the country completely collapsed. Deals with the United States and several other countries fell through, and those countries stopped exporting oil and raw materials to North Korea. The economic collapse was so drastic that it ended up causing millions of North Korean citizens to die of starvation because the government couldn't provide for them anymore.
Factory after factory stopped production because of the sheer lack of this oil and raw materials. There was literally nothing to do. Some factories could keep up using locally mined and produced materials, but only some of them. A large number of factories, however, just stopped completely, and started to become more and more decrepit and dilapidated because of lack of maintenance, and after some years they became so broken that they couldn't have restarted production even if the supply of raw materials problem had been fixed. All the machines and infrastructure just broke and rusted. These factories were a complete loss.
However, and this is where the weirdness starts, the law about refusing to work didn't change. People were still mandated a job by the government, and they were still mandated to do that job or face the concentration camps.
The thing is: There were no new jobs to reassign those people to. Thus, they just didn't. In other words, most of those workers were never reassigned, and had to still attend, by law, those same factories that they were originally assigned to, because nobody had changed that mandate. The guards and government officials at the factories were still making a head count, were still looking if anybody was failing to appear for work, were still enforcing the mandated job at that factory assigned to each citizen, because nobody was telling those government officials otherwise either (and if they failed to do their duty as commanded, it would be them facing the concentration camps.)
So for decades, from about the mid-90's forward, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens have been going every day, six days a week, for 12 hours per day, to those crumbling factories, going through the initial rituals of praising Dear Leader, then sitting at their designated place for 12 hours doing absolutely nothing, and then at the end of the work day going through the mandated struggle sessions (yes, those are also a thing there), and going home.
And all that for an absolute pitiable allowance and an abysmal amount of food (that's just a small fraction of what it was in the heyday of the system.)
Indeed, all those tens or even hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens are pretending to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, doing absolutely nothing, because the guards and government officials are forcing them to, they themselves not being able to stop it because else they themselves would be facing the consequences, and because nobody higher-up in the government has bothered to change the system.
Although something has changed in the last few years, actually.
You see, for almost all of its existence, North Korea has had a huge black market consisting of people doing privately business with each other, secretly from the government. For example a fisherman could secretly sell fish to people for money, a housewife could secretly sew clothes and sell them to people, and the black market for illegally imported western goods is huge (yes, somehow some people do manage to smuggle illegal items into the country, past all the security measures. And by "illegal" we are not talking about drugs, tobacco or booze, but about everyday items common in the west that are not officially allowed, such as snacks, books, small electronics and so on. Heck, some even own entire VHS players and have some western movies in VHS format, something highly illegal in the country.)
In the past few years the North Korean government has got a great idea: Rather than try to fight the black market, take advantage of it!
They are doing that by telling those factory workers (both in the factories that don't produce anything and some of those that do) to go to out there and sell stuff to people for profit, and bring a certain amount of money back to the factory. Besides the threat of the concentration camps if they refuse or fail to do so, they have the bonus incentive that the citizen can keep any extra money that he makes from those sales. In other words, the higher the price that the worker can get from the items, the more money he himself will earn. How generous!
(Unfortunately, and very unsurprisingly, people are not actually making much money this way. They can barely get enough to cover the required amount they need to bring back. Very rarely will people buy the stuff for a significantly higher price. But they need to keep selling or face the concentration camps.)
