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| N. Koreans Toil Abroad Under Grim Conditions | ||||||
| 2005-12-29 | ||||||
The elementary school closed long ago for lack of students. The entire village 20 miles west of Prague has only about 200 people. The schoolhouse is now a factory producing uniforms. Almost all the workers are North Korean, and the women initially looked delighted to see visitors. It gets lonely working out here, thousands of miles from home. They crowded around to chat. "I'm not so happy here. There is nobody who speaks my language. I'm so far from home," volunteered a tentative young woman in a T-shirt and sweatpants who said she was from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. But as she spoke, an older woman with stern posture and an expressionless face — a North Korean security official — passed by in the corridor. The young women scattered wordlessly and disappeared into another room, closing and bolting the door behind them. Hundreds of young North Korean women are working in garment and leather factories like this one, easing a labor shortage in small Czech towns. Their presence in this recent member of the European Union is something of a throwback to before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when Prague, like Pyongyang, was a partner in the Communist bloc. The North Korean government keeps most of the earnings, apparently one of the few legal sources of hard currency for an isolated and impoverished government believed to be living off counterfeiting, drug trafficking and weapons sales. Experts estimate that there are 10,000 to 15,000 North Koreans working abroad in behalf of their government in jobs ranging from nursing to construction work. In addition to the Czech Republic, North Korea has sent workers to Russia, Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola, defectors say. Almost the entire monthly salary of each of the women here, about $260, the Czech minimum wage, is deposited directly into an account controlled by the North Korean government, which gives the workers only a fraction of the money. To the extent that they are allowed outside, they go only in groups. Often they are accompanied by a guard from the North Korean Embassy who is referred to as their "interpreter." They live under strict surveillance in dormitories with photographs of North Korea's late founder Kim Il Sung and current leader Kim Jong Il gracing the walls. Their only entertainment is propaganda films and newspapers sent from North Korea, and occasional exercise in the yard outside. "This is 21st century slave labor," said Kim Tae San, a former official of the North Korean Embassy in Prague. He helped set up the factories in 1998 and served as president of one of the shoe factories until he defected to South Korea in 2002.
The women even had to pay for the propaganda films they were forced to watch. By the time all the deductions were made, each received between $20 and $30 a month. They spent less than $10 of it on food, buying only the cheapest local macaroni. "They try to save money by not eating," said Kim, the former embassy official. He says that his wife, who accompanied him on visits to the factory, was concerned that women's menstruation stopped, their breasts shriveled and many experienced acute constipation. "We were always trying to get them to spend more on food, but they were desperate to bring money home to their families." Kim said that Czechs often mistook the North Korean women for convict laborers because of the harsh conditions. "They would ask the girls, 'What terrible thing did you do to be sent here to work like this?' "
Having shed its own communist dictatorship, the Czech Republic is sensitive to human rights issues. On the other hand, the country has to employ about 200,000 guest workers, largely to replace Czechs who have left to seek higher wages in Western Europe. At the beginning of December, there were 321 North Korean garment workers in six locations in the country, according to the Czech Labor Ministry. The North Koreans declined to speak publicly about the factories. "It is not in our interest to provide information. This is a private thing and nobody should care about it," said a North Korean Embassy employee supervising factory workers in Nachod, a town near the Polish border. Czech officials say the North Koreans are model workers. "They are so quiet you would hardly know they are here," said Zdenek Belohlavek, labor division director for the district of Beroun, which encompasses Zelezna and Zebrak, a larger town where about 75 North Korean seamstresses stitch underwear. Belohlavek displayed a thick dossier of photos and vital statistics of the women, most of whom were born between 1979 and 1981. All their paperwork is in perfect order, and the factories appear to be in full compliance with the law, he said. Belohlavek acknowledged that labor investigators had only communicated with the workers through an interpreter from the North Korean Embassy. He said they were troubled by the women's apparent lack of freedom. "They have guards. I don't know why. It's not like anybody would steal them," he said.
In theory, the women could escape. Although the doors are locked from the inside in Zelezna, the windows are not barred. But where would they go? Few speak any language other than Korean. Zelezna has one pay phone, a mayor's office that is open once a week for two hours and a general store so small that you have to order bread a day in advance. In Zebrak, the North Koreans only go downtown to the supermarket in groups on Fridays between 4 and 6 p.m. They live in a pleasant-looking, lemon-yellow dormitory that was recently constructed across the parking lot from their factory. Blinds are kept drawn and the doors locked. Deliverymen must leave packages on the front stoop. The Baroque town square in Nachod, its Christmas lights, Chinese restaurant and movie theater showing "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "March of the Penguins," was off-limits for the 40 North Korean women who stitch leather suitcases and belts along with guest workers from Vietnam, Mongolia and Ukraine. "They can't go anywhere. You can't talk to them," security guard Antonin Janicek said. "The other women go to the pub and the cinema. Some get married here. But not the Koreans." Last year, when a Czech television crew attempted to film a shoe factory in Skutec, a group of irate North Koreans broke their camera. After the incident, the factory decided it would no longer employ North Koreans because of bad publicity and human rights concerns. "They oftentimes do not even have enough [money] for food," Vaclav Kosner, financial director of the factory, was quoted as telling the CTK news agency. "They are sometimes truly hungry." The seamstresses were first sent abroad at the height of North Korea's famine to raise money to buy raw materials for North Korean shoes and clothing. North Korea officially was a partner in the factories through two trading companies, but former diplomat Kim said that this was a front to cover the government's embarrassment about having to send workers abroad. The factories are mostly Czech-owned, but the underwear factory in Zebrak is owned by an Italian company. By far the largest number of North Koreans working outside their country are in Russia, where they do mostly logging and construction in military-style camps run by the North Korean government. When the camps were set up in the early 1970s, the workers were North Korean prisoners. But as the North Korean economy disintegrated in the late 1980s, doing hard labor in Siberia came to be seen as a reward because at least it meant getting adequate food. Kim Yong Il, who got a job in mine construction in the 1990s because of his brother's political connections, said he and a dozen other men were kept in a house with bars on the windows and a padlock on the door. He received no money, but his family in North Korea received extra food rations. He defected in 1996 and now lives in Seoul. He is one of about 50 North Koreans who escaped the camps in Russia and are now living in South Korea, according to the Christian North Korean Assn., a defector group in Seoul. There have been no such incidents with the seamstresses in the Czech Republic. The fact that they come from Pyongyang, home only to the most loyal North Koreans, means that their families have privileges that could be taken away in an instant if a relative were to defect. "If they were to run away, their families would vanish into thin air and they would never see them again," said Kim, the former diplomat. In 2002, the diplomat and his wife defected in Prague and sought asylum from South Korea. Soon afterward, their adult son and daughter were taken away. He believes they were sent to a prison camp. Kim, 53, recently asked a contact in North Korea to gather some information about relatives. "Even my wife's relatives, down to the second cousins, have disappeared," he said. "We couldn't find a trace of them."
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #19 Darrell, I agree with you that enforcement of immigration laws is criminally lax. HOWEVER, the article was about North Koreans in a state of servitude to their own nation, and you yourself tried to map it to US illegal immigration in an attempt to say "don't judge". Not a mention of NKor's behavior which, in my book, is a marker of a moonbat. Your simplistic "servitude is servitude" also comes out of the moral equivalence playbook as a means to evade looking at the essential differences. You waddled like a duck and you quacked like a duck, so I won't feel chastened by your injured-sounding denial that you ARE a duck... BTW, fred, I suggest making the multiline text input box four or five times taller: I didn't realize I typed in THAT much text. eek. I will hit the tip jar in penance. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-12-29 22:49 |
| #18 Here goes then, Half Empty. But I'm afraid not a subject suited for gorgeous nature motifs, at least as my keyboard handles such things. ;-) A portmanteau term We talk long, long! but think short All Fred's loot wasted |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-12-29 17:45 |
| #17 portmanteau term Hiakoo Line One ! |
| Posted by: HalfEmpty 2005-12-29 17:02 |
| #16 Don't be silly, Aris. People here say things contrary to the popular wisdom all the time. When you do so wisely, we listen and learn. When you do so foolishly, then the thread rapidly becomes Arisified (a horrible portmanteau term, of which I sincerely hope this is the final usage ever). |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-12-29 16:20 |
| #15 I actually warned RBers to NOT "beat on the Czechs", Ptah. It appears, Ptah, that you can read entire books between the lines. If you had read between the lines what I intended between the lines, you would have noted that "Dear Leader" and the Mexican leadership and U.S. employers of illegal aliens are the villains here, and they're doing what they're doing for their own materialism. As for my "materialist world view", neither the subject North Koreans nor the Mexican illegals are awash in the food, clothing, and shelter that you take for granted sitting there on your high horse. For hungry North Korean and Mexican families, food will trump rights any day of the week. That doesn't mean rights are less important, it just means your anti-materialism tirade is misplaced. Go rant at "Dear Leader" and Vincente Fox. Our government is actively involved in the servitude by not enforcing the laws that are on the books and by dishing out mere wrist-slaps to the few employers of illegals that it chooses to track down and prosecute. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2005-12-29 16:05 |
| #14 Hundreds of young North Korean women are working in garment and leather factories like this one, easing a labor shortage in small Czech towns. The Czech's really don't have a work force? A true labor shortage? I also wonder if they looked into other countries for labor help. Why North Korea? |
| Posted by: Jan 2005-12-29 16:02 |
| #13 Dude, don't "Aris" this thread. Yeah, never say anything contrary to common wisdom. |
| Posted by: Aris Katsaris 2005-12-29 15:42 |
| #12 an older woman with stern posture and an expressionless face — a North Korean security official It never f***ing changes. Your basic Stalinst floor/block watcher. |
| Posted by: Leon Clavin 2005-12-29 15:35 |
| #11 Servitude is servitude, no matter who gets the profits, wr. If we lock them out, then that's more pressure for them to change what should be changed at home. I'm not for importing North Koreans or Mexicans or even Aris, wr. They all need to get their own houses in order and stop using us for excuses. Quite a statement, Darrell, espeically when it is YOU who are providing the following rationale that they use to use us for excuses: This is outrageous but, before we beat on the Czechs too much, we should contemplate some of our own businesses that use cheap foreign labor. Long hours, sub-standard conditions, and sending most of the money back home is not unique to North Koreans in the Czech Republic. We could stand to build that fence and enforce our own laws. Your focus, not on the choices of any of the actors, but on their working conditions, reveals you as a materialist. I reject your implied premise of equivalence between us and the Czechs because I reject your premise that their working conditions is morally relevant because their servitude would not be rendered morally acceptable if they were afforded better living conditions and more wages. What I consider relevant is their power of choice, and the factors impinging on their choices. From what I know of Illegal aliens in the United States, they are not monitored by Mexican embassy workers, their families are NOT held hostage back in Mexico City by the Mexican government to ensure cooperation, nor are their wages (such as they are) automatically deposited in a third party account controlled by a Mexican embassy worker who pre-garnishes them before distribution. Indeed, such deposits would be traceable by US Immigration officials and be used as evidence against the factory owner who, unlike the czech factory owner in the story, would be liable for prosecution. Rather, the wages are necessarily paid in cash SO AS TO BE UNCONTROLLED AND UNMONITORED. The form of payment does not obliviate the cruciality of choice, but rather highlights it: The fact that the workers are not forced to send money to Mexico, but do voluntarily and by their own unconstrained choice, is highlighted by illegal alien rights workers. Again, your materialist worldview makes you focus on the money flow and ignore the moral content of the choices (or lack of choice) that are involved. By ignoring the choices, one is permitted to ignore the forces impinging on the actors: both sets of workers are motivated by a desire to send money back to their families, but in only one is the government actively involved. I should also point out another difference that I hold is morally relevant, and which your materialism leads you to clearly discount: The Story plainly states that the Czechs can't do anything about this because THEIR PAPERWORK IS IN ORDER. This means that these are legal immigrant workers bound by Czech contract law. On the other hand, your moral argument attempts to map the United States to the Czechs by arguing that illegal aliens in the US are equivalent to legal immigrant workers in the Czech republic. INVALID. You, having failed to establish equivalence in the minor premises, means that your conclusion of equivalence as the conclusion is invalid. The attempt to do so is doubtless based, again, on the materialist exclusion of choice as being relevant, deliberately confusing countenance with ignorance: there cannot be any moral equivalence between the Czechs, who are aware of where these people are and cannot do anything because all their laws have been adhered do, and the americans, who would arrest a factory owner for hiring illegal aliens but do not do so because both the factory owner and the illegal alien workers conspire to keep INS authorities from knowing of their existance. I don't doubt that you, or any rantburger here, if aware of the existance of a factory hiring illegal aliens, would blow the whistle, but any failure to do so because we are UNAWARE of their existance is NOT a moral failure. "Sins" of omission have, as a precondition, the requirement that the actor who failed to act was aware of the situation. I am, in fact, not at all sure that the Czechs are culpable at this moment: this is a "Merchant of Venice" situation where one party has manipulated the legal environment to create a situation that is personally profitable, but which the authorities did not anticipate and factor into their legislation. Again, imperfection, ignorance, and fallibility are not morally culpable: only deliberate inaction after being made aware of the situation incurs moral taint. Indeed, it seems to me that complaints that the Czechs have not FIXED THE PROBLEM IMMEDIATELY RIGHT NOW WHEN HE, DARRELL, DEMANDS IT, is to complain that they are not as efficient as a police state run by an enlightened despot. Finally, and most obviously, other than Darrell, I do not see anybody jumping on the Czechs: I DO see them jumping on the NKors. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-12-29 14:11 |
| #10 I wish I would have had more time to visit towns outside of Prague when I was there. One tour guide was especially animated and wonderful. Having grown up in Prague, he talked of "when the Russians came, then when the Germans came, (inferring not so nice conditions), but when the Americans came how wonderful it was, and that's why he wanted to learn English." "..55% was taken off the top as a "voluntary" contribution to the cause of the socialist revolution. The women had to buy and cook their own food. Additional sums were deducted for accommodation, transportation and such extras as flowers for the birthdays of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The women even had to pay for the propaganda films they were forced to watch. By the time all the deductions were made, each received between $20 and $30 a month. They spent less than $10 of it on food, buying only the cheapest local macaroni." Are any materials made from these "slave labor via North Korea" finding there way into american stores? Granted they aren't sweat shops, but after their money is taken from them it certainly is something to look at. I wouldn't want to buy anything made from these factories to promote this type of working conditions. The fact that they come from Pyongyang, home only to the most loyal North Koreans, means that their families have privileges that could be taken away in an instant if a relative were to defect. "If they were to run away, their families would vanish into thin air and they would never see them again," said Kim, the former diplomat How horrible to live in such substandard living conditions. To worry about their families if they tried to escape. This being 2005 almost 2006, that this type of crap is still happening. Unf***ingbelievable. |
| Posted by: Jan 2005-12-29 11:25 |
| #9 Servitude is servitude, no matter who gets the profits, wr. If we lock them out, then that's more pressure for them to change what should be changed at home. I'm not for importing North Koreans or Mexicans or even Aris, wr. They all need to get their own houses in order and stop using us for excuses. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2005-12-29 11:19 |
| #8 Jiri Balaban, owner of the Zelezna factory, said it was none of his business ... "My business is that they work," he said. Didnt the owners of the Nazi slave labor factories say the same thing about the Jews from the labor camps? And didnt they go to prison for it? |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2005-12-29 10:22 |
| #7 Oh, so sneaking across a border and working illegally is equivalent to a govt. selling their citizens into indentured servitude (and collecting a lion's share of their pay). I guess we could lock them out completely and our collective conscience would be alleved. Dude, don't "Aris" this thread. |
| Posted by: whitecollar redneck 2005-12-29 10:22 |
| #6 How "involuntary" the servitude is can be rather irrelevant. If your family was impoverished in Mexico and you could only feed them by illegally entering the U.S. and picking vegetables or mowing lawns or spreading roofing tar for 70 hours a week and living in a room with eight other illegals, then you might find that you have a lot in common with these North Korean women. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2005-12-29 09:59 |
| #5 Darrell I believe we were talking about involuntary servitude. My other brother Darrell agrees with me. Larry |
| Posted by: whitecollar redneck 2005-12-29 09:06 |
| #4 This is outrageous but, before we beat on the Czechs too much, we should contemplate some of our own businesses that use cheap foreign labor. Long hours, sub-standard conditions, and sending most of the money back home is not unique to North Koreans in the Czech Republic. We could stand to build that fence and enforce our own laws. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2005-12-29 08:08 |
| #3 Not to worry, HRW, AI, UNHRC, etc. are all over this example of slavery /not. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-12-29 04:21 |
| #2 Thanks Steve. NK Nation = An inanimate machine |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-12-29 02:41 |
| #1 As I understand it North Korea often inprisons entire families for the wrongdoing of a single member. It is a hell of a deterrent when you know that not only can you be sent to prison but your mother, father, brothers, children, and little sisters can be sent as well. Even if you escape North Korea you automatically sentence your entire family to the gulags. THIS here is little short of slavery. The women are simply 'rented out' to the factories. And anyone want to bet 'factory work' isn't the only thing these women are 'rented' out for? |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-12-29 00:16 |