On every Friday ranking officials and white-color workers of North Korea's Workers’ Party, state agencies, business establishments and organizations perform physical labor at construction or other project sites. An exercise called Friday labor.

On this day most offices are closed as the staff go out for labor, suspending their routine work. All ranking officials and white-color workers, except National Defense Commission chairman Kim Jong Il, participate. University students, ranking military officials and even officials assigned abroad are not exempt.

The North’s Korea Central TV Broadcasting Station reported early this year that ranking officials of ministries, central administrative agencies and civil servants conducted the year's first Friday labor at the construction site of the Memorial Tower of Three Unification Principles in Pyongyang. In April they did the same at the arboretum of Kumsusan Memorial Palace where the body of Kim Il Sung is laid in state, and the construction site of an archery stadium at Chongchun (youth) Street in Mangyongdae District, housing many sports facilities.

It was late in the 1970s when Kim Jung Il's succession to power was being consolidated that Friday labor was initiated in the North. The practice was known outside the country early in the 1990s. Along with party policy study on Monday, lectures on Wednesday and life consolidation on Saturday, labor on Friday came into being as a means of controlling the people. North Korea describes Friday labor in these words: "Patriotic labor of loyalty contributing toward strengthening and developing a flourishing society, organizations, country and nation. It is also worthy labor aimed at nourishing ranking workers as revolutionaries and the vanguard of class laborers."

Various levels of party organizations manage Friday labor. Pertinent party organs assign the sites and norm of work to agencies, business establishments and organizations in advance. In the absence of such assignments, organizations tell higher-ups how much work they will do and where. Lower echelons sometimes substitute extending a helping hand at cooperative farms with which they have sisterhood relationships for Friday labor.

Since Friday labor calls for white-color workers to do menial work with shovels and picks, one is liable to imagine they would be reluctant to do the labor or evade it. According to North Korean escapees to the South who had taken part in Friday labor for a long time, however, that is not necessarily the case. Quite a few of them prefer a day of labor in the open, enjoying sunshine and cool breeze, to squandering time in office, studying their seniors' faces, they say.

Though it is called physical labor, work done is not so strenuous as the laborer's. Even if you don't work hard enough to sweat, no one scolds you. After all, the brunt of work is to be done by ordinary laborers or “shock troops.” If you work moderately, as if it were an exercise, repeated rest is given followed by a lunch break.

Rather elaborate lunches provided for the Friday labor participants are a major attraction; perhaps the genuine reason why they take part in the work so willingly. As organizing permeates every activity in the North, so lunch preparation is dubbed "lunch organization" among ranking officials. Specific requests are sometimes conveyed to men in charge at work sites or cooperative farm committee chairmen in advance, while some tactful people among them prepare a generous lunch on their own initiative.

Chicken meat and pork are basically served in the lunch, which can include goat or dog meat. If liquor is also served, participants in Friday labor couldn't be happier. As a result, some people sarcastically say, "The day of Friday labor is a day supplementing nutrition for ranking officials."

The afternoon work schedule is basically the same as that in the morning. The more nourishing the lunch is, the later afternoon work resumes and the lower the work efficiency gets.

(Kim Kwang In, kki@chosun.com )