Mick Hartley

Dickensian-style labour in the great socialist nation. From the Daily NK:

Wig and eyelash assembly work has taken off as a cottage industry in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, as intensifying market controls and rising inflation leave North Korean people with few other ways to earn income.

“Wig and eyelash contract assembly has until now been carried out mainly in detention facilities and factory units, but since late last year, trading companies have been negotiating higher per-unit rates with Chinese partners and expanding the scale of their operations, so work is now flowing into ordinary private homes as well,” a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Thursday.

The source described scenes now common across Chongjin: “These days, it has become a familiar sight to see people working through the night by oil lamp in dim rooms with unreliable electricity, making wigs and eyelashes. Because it has become impossible to make a living through market trading, people are flooding into wig and eyelash assembly work, however physically demanding it may be, because at least you get paid for what you produce.”…

“You can feed your family by making eyelashes, so people work through the night, and even children help with the assembly work after they come home from school,” the source said. “Among people, there is a saying going around: ‘Every single strand helps keep us alive.’”…

The finished wigs and eyelashes are shipped to China, where they are relabeled as Chinese-made products and exported to global markets. North Korean labor, paid a fraction of what workers elsewhere would earn, effectively underpins the bottom of an international supply chain.

According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, wigs and eyelashes account for well over half of all North Korean exports to China, making them by far the country’s leading export commodity. Because neither product appears on the list of goods banned under U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea, Pyongyang treats the sector as a strategic export priority.

Disputes over per-unit pay rates between North Korean trading companies and their Chinese counterparts have persisted, but the arrangement is sustained by a convergence of interests: North Korea urgently needs foreign currency, and Chinese buyers need low-cost processing. The source suggested the sector will remain North Korea’s dominant export to China for the foreseeable future.

South Korea has Samsung, Hyundai, K-Pop: North Korea sells wigs and eyelashes assembled by families working through the night by oil lamp.