Small-sized businesses producing goods such as shoes and cigarettes are on a steady rise in North Korea, backed by the country’s more affluent middle class, but larger profits are also leading to bigger conflicts within the often family-run companies over how to split up the gains, a local source told Daily NK.
“There are more joint-businesses springing up that are run by parents and children, mothers and daughters, and among siblings, since they have proven to be quite lucrative, but there have been a lot of undesired consequences,” the source from South Pyongan Province said on Wednesday. “There was even a case recently in which a daughter deducted her mother’s meal expenses from her earnings, and this led to a fight between the two,” she said.
Many of these businesses that are de facto owned by donjuLiterally "masters of money," donju refers to people who hav... More [new affluent middle class] families are run on money pooled together from different members of the family. Usually, the sons and daughters, who invest more money, oversee the entire operation and are in charge of finances and securing markets for sales. The parents are mostly tasked with manufacturing the goods, according to the source. Therefore, it’s commonplace for the children to calculate the profits for their parents at month-end, as they’re doing the payrolls for other employees, she added.
“These jointly run operations always see nasty fights break out at the end of the month,” said the source. “Deducting food expenses for their workers does not become a problem, but when it comes to their parents it no doubt ends in conflict.”
“In the case of the younger generation, they prefer to adhere to strict profit-splitting,” said the source, which is why they argue that deducting meal expenses is “a basic principle of business.” However, parents call this “immoral” saying, regardless of how important money may be, “charging parents for what they eat is what people would do only in a capitalist society,” she said.
The source asserted this conflict within the family stems from fundamental differences in values between parents and their children. “The managing children say business is not about moral values and instead about numbers, and that it’s important to ‘know the market,” the source said. She went on to surmise that the family conflicts are deeply rooted in education that North Korea provides on ‘class struggles’ as well as the gap between generations.
Seeing such trouble erupt in family-run businesses, bystanders have said, “Business should never be carried out among family members,” said the source. They also say “the best market principle is to hire someone outside of the family and pay them wages,” she added.
