Why North Korea introduced its own version of alternative civilian service
The DPRK’s shock detachments realize a dream of early communist leaders and provide a path to social advancement
Andrei Lankov March 25, 2022
Members of a speedy battle youth strike detachment raise their hands and wave flags at a construction site | Image: Rodong Sinmun (Aug. 31, 2021)
North Korean cities have always been crowded with men and women clad in uniform. The country has one of the world’s largest standing armies, and many professional groups require members to wear uniforms, like personnel of the Pyongyang subway system.
One kind of uniform appears almost as frequently as the military one — that of strike brigades (돌격대). This peculiar North Korean institution can be seen as a distant analog of alternative civilian service.
These shock brigades are also the embodiment of a dream communist economic planners have entertained for over a century. Leon Trotsky, one of the founding fathers of communist Russia, once suggested that communist states conscript unskilled laborers to paramilitary “labor armies,” providing them with food, accommodation and ideological education and dispatching them to areas of need.
While unpaid and requiring personnel to engage in difficult manual work, these strike detachments have nonetheless been popular as a means to advance one’s career outside of military service. The efficiency of this unique form of labor mobilization is unclear, but in any case, work and life in these shock brigades has become a common experience that unites large numbers of North Koreans.
A speedy battle youth strike detachment | Image: Rodong Sinmun, May 16, 2015UNPAID LABOR
North Korea began to experiment with militarized labor in the late 1940s, and strike detachments took their current shape in the 1970s.
Regular strike detachments enlist young men and women who are not eligible for military service. This category includes so-called speedy battle youth strike detachments, which form a centralized, nationwide, military-like structure consisting of brigades, battalions and companies.
Recruits typically serve for six to 10 years, similar to military service. They also have ranks, insignia and uniforms and live in barracks, even undergoing basic military training. They usually work at major construction sites across the country, including northern railway lines.
Personnel in the speedy battle detachments are almost never paid. Yet until the 2000s, these detachments were relatively popular and attracted volunteers. The reason was simple: It provides a means of social advancement outside the military.
To advance in North Korea, a person should join the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) and ideally have a military service record. But despite its large size, the military is quite selective when it comes to drafting recruits, rejecting people on the basis of health or politically suspicious family backgrounds.
If one can’t join the military, the only way to get ahead is to join a speedy battle detachment or some similar paramilitary organization. Then one can join the party and build up the resume for a job such as a foreman or minor clerk.
In addition, a stint with a permanent strike detachment gives countryside youth a chance for travel and adventure. Due to heavy control over domestic movement, North Koreans from villages and smaller towns rarely travel and typically cannot visit Pyongyang. But the state deploys strike detachments all around the country, including in the capital.
It also helps that regular strike detachments usually take reasonably good care of their members, who are well fed, well dressed and live in barracks that are quite comfortable by North Korean standards.
Besides the speedy battle youth strike detachments, there are other kinds of regular detachments in the DPRK, but most are small. For example, the WPK members strike detachment, created in 1980, carries out construction for what could be described as cult objects — statues, memorial steles and other structures dedicated to the Kim family, including such famous landmarks as the Juche Tower and Arch of Triumph.
There are even small, specialized strike detachments consisting of engineers and technicians including recent college graduates, dispatched to the countryside to carry out seriously underpaid work in industrial enterprises.
Workers at a construction site for the tower of immortality in Pyongyang. Strike detachments of Workers’ Party of Korea members carry out construction on structures dedicated to the Kim family, Andrei Lankov writes. | Image: NK News (Oct. 1, 2016)IRREGULAR WORK
Recently, attitudes toward strike detachments have changed due to the use of non-permanent detachments that do not provide the same advantages for gaining party membership and advancing one’s career.
The state creates these irregular strike detachments on an ad-hoc basis to complete a particular project and then disband. These groups can provide cheap unskilled labor and usually take the name of the project on which the personnel worked, for example a power station in the countryside.
Irregular strike detachments are usually classified by level rather than through the military-style structure of brigades and battalions. Some are subordinated to North Korea’s Cabinet or the WPK Central Committee, while others are managed at the province or city level.
Authorities staff these irregular detachments by issuing quotas to local factories and government agencies. A factory, for example, may be required to dispatch five employees to a local detachment for six months of unpaid service. Personnel usually work in shifts last a few months and return to their workplaces after completing their shift.
While workers live in barracks and are issued uniforms, their time in the temporary detachments does not replace military service, and people view service in the irregular detachments as a waste of time.
Starting in the 1990s, when state surveillance weakened, some people found ways to avoid the troublesome labor duties. They did this by getting a job exempted from such duty, or more commonly by hiring a replacement to go to the detachment in their stead. Some poor but fit North Koreans have turned this into their job: For a fee, they work as substitutes for richer, busier and lazier compatriots.
Increasingly, strike detachment workers have viewed their mandatory service as an opportunity to develop commercially useful skills, Andrei Lankov writes | Image: Rodong Sinmun, May 16, 2015ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
Assessing the effectiveness of strike detachment’s unpaid work is a task better left for future historians, but it’s clear that the brigades have played a prominent role in North Korea’s recent history.
In particular, some people have viewed the obligatory service as a way to acquire commercially useful skills, such as during the minor construction boom in the country from 2007 to 2017.
During this period, small construction work teams emerged that were essentially semi-legal, partly private companies. This development allowed even common construction workers with decent skills to earn good money, especially when doing renovation or interior work.
North Koreans drafted into strike detachments could thus develop skills that would later prove useful to civilian life.
Edited by Bryan Betts
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