North Korean authorities are cracking down on corruption in workplace assignments for technical high school graduates, aiming to prevent wealthy and powerful families from bribing their way into desirable jobs.
According to a Daily NK source in South Pyongan province recently, the Cabinet’s education ministry issued a special order to provincial and city education departments late last month, instructing them to assign workplaces to technical high school graduates fairly.
In response, the education department of Nampo’s people’s committee pressured schools to “assign the right graduates to the right workplaces,” instructing schools that they must “take full responsibility for the results of workplace assignments.”
Typically, schools send graduate lists to the city’s labor department, where guidance officials assign graduates to workplaces. During this process, officials often accept bribes to place children from powerful or wealthy families in desirable positions. The latest education ministry order broadly aims to stop this practice, the source said.
“Some graduates used to get assigned to good workplaces regardless of their grades because they were officials’ children,” the source said. “To stop this, the Cabinet made provincial and city education departments directly responsible for implementing graduates’ workplace assignments, with Pyongyang warning it would conduct a survey on the order’s execution.”
The system in practice
For example, Chungsong Technical High School in Nampo’s Taean district specializes in electrical engineering—its students conduct hands-on training with motors, transformers and generators at the Taean Heavy Machine Complex. Large workplaces like Taean Heavy Machine Complex can avoid collective “volunteer work” and long-term mobilizations, which is why most technical high school graduates prefer them.
“If you join a large workplace after graduation, you can avoid getting dragged off to volunteer in labor shock brigades or on farms, so families with little power or money welcome the order,” the source said.
Indeed, with the latest order, parents and students from families who couldn’t bribe officials or use connections during workplace assignment now hope they can find employment at such places.
On the other hand, families who wanted to leverage power or money during workplace assignment are less enthusiastic about the order.
“If these control measures continue, officials won’t send their children to technical high schools,” the source said. “There are already signs that families are steering clear of enrolling children in technical high schools.”
“The state wants to expand technical high schools, but if officials’ children abandon such schools, the state will have no choice but to turn a blind eye to officials paying bribes to place their children in good workplaces,” the source said. “Preventing bribery in this society is impossible.”
Whether the latest order proves effective in preventing class privilege in workplace assignments therefore remains unclear, the source said.
