Article

2005-12-29 Europe

N. Koreans Toil Abroad Under Grim Conditions

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Posted by Steve White 2005-12-29 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11132 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 00:16|| Front Page Top

#2 Thanks Steve.

NK Nation = An inanimate machine

Posted by Red Dog 2005-12-29 02:41|| 2005-12-29 02:41|| Front Page Top

#3 Not to worry, HRW, AI, UNHRC, etc. are all over this example of slavery /not.

Posted by phil_b">phil_b 2005-12-29 04:21|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/] 2005-12-29 04:21|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 08:08|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 09:06|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 09:59|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 10:22|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 10:22|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 11:19|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 11:25|| Front Page Top

#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">Ptah 2005-12-29 14:11|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2005-12-29 14:11|| Front Page Top

#12 an older woman with stern posture and an expressionless face â 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|| 2005-12-29 15:35|| Front Page Top

#13 Dude, don't "Aris" this thread.

Yeah, never say anything contrary to common wisdom.

Posted by Aris Katsaris">Aris Katsaris 2005-12-29 15:42|| 2005-12-29 15:42|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 16:02|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 16:05|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 16:20|| Front Page Top

#17 portmanteau term
Hiakoo Line One !

Posted by HalfEmpty 2005-12-29 17:02|| 2005-12-29 17:02|| Front Page Top

#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|| 2005-12-29 17:45|| Front Page Top

#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">Ptah 2005-12-29 22:49|| http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org]">[http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2005-12-29 22:49|| Front Page Top

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