With North Korean authorities recently ordering that more than 80% of the university students set to graduate next February be dispatched to “Three Revolution teams,” a source says some soon-to-be-graduates are resisting the authorities’ measure and coming up with ways to avoid deployment.
In a telephone conversation with Daily NK yesterday, the source, who is based in North Korea, said that many scheduled graduates have been rushing to secure employment certificates.
Employment certificates show that you have already secured priority employment at a government body or enterprise as a “necessary worker.”
Submitting such a certificate to the university’s deployment department can get you an exemption from the Three Revolution teams.
In principle, government bodies or enterprises should take the initiative in selecting talent, but scheduled graduates are seeking institutions out and even offering them bribes to write certificates so they can get out of serving in the Three Revolution teams.
Because universities also know what is going on, scheduled graduates with employment certificates must offer bribes to cadres in their university deployment department, too.
This method requires connections or bribes, putting it out of reach of scheduled graduates from families without power or money.
The problem is that graduates who get out of serving with the Three Revolution teams by receiving an employment certificate will not actually work at the institutions. Instead, they hope to engage in private business while paying monthly sums to their nominal employer, a scheme North Koreans frequently call “Aug. 3 earnings.”
Some scheduled graduates with employment certificates and exemption from the Three Revolution teams are also apparently seeking to take a year off before entering People’s Economy College, Kumsong University of Politics or some other cadre training school for the nation’s bureaucracy or political leadership.
However, most use the time to help their parents’ businesses or by earning money through private economic activity such as running procurement shops.
Many prospective students get employment certificates from powerful institutions such as the People’s Economic Committee, the military or Ministry of State Security so they can run bigger businesses.
To put this another way, powerful institutions are taking bribes to issue fake employment certificates to scheduled graduates.
For government bodies and enterprises, getting money each month to put toward operation costs through the Aug. 3 earnings scheme makes better economic sense than paying monthly wages to real employees.
However, for the authorities — who aim to produce technological innovation by strengthening the ideological education of the youth — this could cause problems in cultivating loyalty toward the regime.
The source said the state has targeted the Aug. 3 earnings for eradication as a “non-socialist phenomenon”; yet, in reality, government bodies or enterprises would not function with it.
He further predicted that the number of scheduled graduates engaging in Aug. 3 earnings may grow this year with the state allotting so many of them to the Three Revolution teams.
