This study analyzes the labor ideology and its normative characteristics embodied in the 1972 Socialist Constitution and the 1978 Socialist Labor Law, in connection with the development of the ‘all-people’ labor mobilization process from the late ...
This study analyzes the labor ideology and its normative characteristics embodied in the 1972 Socialist Constitution and the 1978 Socialist Labor Law, in connection with the development of the ‘all-people’ labor mobilization process from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Around the late 1950s, the People’s Democratic Constitution enacted in 1948 had effectively lost its validity, and a prolonged legal vacuum persisted until the adoption of the Socialist Constitution in 1972. Within this context, the mobilization of labor found its ideological and legal grounding in constitutional provisions such as Article 4 (Creative application of Marxism-Leninism) and Article 23 (Principle of promoting the people’s welfare), and was institutionalized and justified through provisions in the Labor Law such as Article 11 (National development and promotion of welfare) and Article 5 (Principle of full employment).
Under this normative framework, labor mobilization functioned not merely as an economic mobilization policy but as a comprehensive labor-life norm aimed at internalizing loyalty to the Party and the State and fostering ideological, organizational, and moral discipline. As a result, the collective and compulsory nature of labor mobilization became integrated with control mechanisms, establishing a unified and totalized normative system. This demonstrates that North Korea’s labor norms constitute an order of ‘state-wide labor control’ grounded in the compulsory labor obligations of the ‘entire people.’