As North Korea’s national mobilization for the fall harvest nears its conclusion, a bizarre trend has emerged of farm workers being paid to serve as substitute workers on other farms, showing how market logic is being applied to the mobilization system.
A source in South Hwanghae province told Daily NK recently that there’s a final push to mobilize workers around the country after the regime gave orders to complete the harvest without wasting a single grain. In the main cereal-producing regions, members of the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea have been ordered to finish strong by going out to the farms at least three times a week.
Members of the Women’s Union are responding to authorities’ mobilization drive by paying 50,000 North Korean won per person to be exempted from the work. Since most union members make their money as market vendors, it makes more sense to pay the fee than to skip a day’s work at the market. In effect, they are paying 50,000 won to buy time.
Officials accept the arrangement
The heads of neighborhood watch units and women’s union chapters actually appreciate it when people pay to be exempted from service. Unit heads can stay in their superiors’ good books as long as they send eight or nine people to each project. Fees collected can be used to send replacements to fill the quota, the source said.
Since these officials can stay out of trouble as long as they meet the quota, in other words, it does not particularly matter to them whether the work is done by the people originally assigned to the job or by people paid to serve as replacements.
The problem is that a substantial number of these replacements are themselves farm workers.
The whole point of fall mobilization is for urban residents and office workers to be temporarily reassigned to farms to lend a hand to busy workers. But in an ironic twist, farm workers who are supposed to be working on their own farms are instead being paid to serve as replacements on other farms.
This scenario in which the people nominally being helped — the farmers — are standing in for the helpers is openly occurring at farms in North Korea.
Cash trumps ideology
Farm workers were eager to work when they could stash some crops in their pockets or backpacks, the source explained. But in the final stages of the harvest — moving sheaves of rice, harvesting radishes and cabbages, and plowing the fields — workers have nothing to show for their toil, so more of them are skipping their regular assignments and going to the labor market where they can receive a day’s wages as a replacement worker.
While North Korea constantly organizes unpaid service projects and makes political appeals for the whole nation to pitch in, the reality is that cash is widely used to claim exemptions from service projects and hire replacements to fill those spots. That shows how North Korea’s socialist mobilization system is already pervaded by market incentives.
Farm workers paid to fill in for others in service projects often say that making hay while the sun shines is good for everybody — both the state and the people — and that both those who pay and those who are paid are serving the country. But the main takeaway here is how important cash flow is for these farm workers, the source said.
