Suffering from COVID-19-inspired economic troubles, North Korea recently held meetings to diagnose issues facing the nation’s factories and enterprises and pressed for measures to expand production.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a reporting partner in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Tuesday that the Cabinet held teleconferences to discuss the matter from Apr. 26 to Apr. 29. Participating in the meetings were the heads of large enterprises (Class 1 and above), as well as the department heads of provincial, city and county people’s committees.
A notice that the meetings would be held was given in an expanded plenary meeting of the Cabinet in early April.
The main focus of the meetings was to review how well economic plans were carried out in the first quarter. That is to say, officials from each department, sector and province announced their plans and results before facing criticism about their results from the Cabinet.
The Cabinet took serious issue with how there were too many instances of people carrying out plans on paper with no substantive results, the reporting partner said. The Cabinet has long criticized false or exaggerated reports, but things have yet to improve on the ground.
The meetings also compared the results achieved by privately-run companies and state-run enterprises. Officials noted how services and supply networks that depend on market activity or operate under state agencies met their quotas because sales were brisk. In response, Cabinet officials said: “That the workplace managers in state-run enterprises can’t fulfill plans is because they lack work ethic.”
The Cabinet called for careful inspections of workplaces that carried out their plans well and those that could not, and ordered that the reasons for failures be reported up the line.
After the meetings, the people’s committee of North Hamgyong Province sternly warned the managers of workplaces that had achieved less than 70% of their planned production to prepare to step down from their positions if they lag behind in their second-quarter reviews.
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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