Tag: restaurants

https://twitter.com/pearswick/status/764016048366424066

This is the second group of overseas North Korean restaurant workers to defect to South Korea in the past two months.  I have to wonder if ROK intelligence is focusing hard on getting North Korean restaurant workers to defect in an effort to close the restaurants and dry up a source of foreign currency for the Kim regime?:

Up to three North Korean restaurant staff have recently escaped their workplace in China for possible defection to South Korea, a source familiar with inter-Korean affairs said Monday.

The North Koreans are currently staying in a third country in Southeast Asia after running away from a North Korea-run restaurant located at the northwestern Chinese city of Xian, according to the source.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

This is an interesting development in the defector restaurant worker issue.  The North Koreans are willing to send the families of the defectors to Seoul.  I would assume that not all of their families would go and the ones sent would be risking the death of the families members staying behind if they too defected.  I would also think these family members would be under strict instructions to try and convince the defectors to come back to North Korea.  The ROK authorities probably understand this and this is why they denied North Korea’s request:

North Korea has notified Seoul of its plans to send family members of the restaurant workers who defected earlier in the month to South Korea, the country’s state-run news agency said Friday.

A group of 13 North Korean people defected from the same Pyongyang-run restaurant in China and came to South Korea in early April in what has become a steady stream of people leaving the isolated country.

North Korea has consistently claimed South Korea abducted the workers and demanded that they be returned to their loved ones at once. Pyongyang also threatened to take strong action against the South if its demands are not met.

“The families of the abductees are eagerly asking for face-to-face contact with their daughters as they were forced to part from their beloved daughters,” said the notification sent to South Korea by Ri Chung-bok, chairman of North Korea’s Red Cross.

The notification was carried by the North’s Korean Central News Agency.

“At their earnest requests, our side again seriously notifies your side of our decision to send them to Seoul via Panmunjom (a truce village),” it showed.

South Korea should not conceal the unethical crime under the pretext of “international practice,” but should take “immediate technical measures” for the families to reunite with the defectors, the letter said.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry refused the demand, however, saying in a press release after the report that “The latest group defection by the workers at a overseas North Korean restaurant was completely of their own free will.”

A ministry official also said the South Korean government has not received any official notification letter from North Korea on the matter of sending the family members of the defectors to Seoul.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

This is actually pretty amazing that an entire restaurant staff would defect because the selection process for the job is relatively stringent so it isn’t like the workers are coming from desperately poor families in North Korea.  It is also pretty impressive that the entire staff was able to coordinate with each other to do this without fear of one of them informing on them back to regime minders:

 Thirteen North Koreans working in a state-run restaurant outside the country have defected to South Korea, a government official in Seoul said Friday.

The South Korean government estimates that Pyongyang rakes in around $10 million every year from some 130 restaurants it operates — with mostly North Korean staff — in 12 countries, including neighbouring China.

Last month, while unveiling a series of unilateral sanctions on Pyongyang over its January nuclear test, Seoul had urged South Korean citizens overseas to boycott any such establishments, saying their profits funded the North’s nuclear weapons programme.

The defectors, one male manager and a dozen women, arrived in the South on Thursday, Unification Ministry spokesman Jeong Joon-Hee told reporters.

He declined to identify the country where the restaurant they had been working in was located.

There have been defections by individual restaurant workers in the past, but this is the first time so many staff from one restaurant have defected en masse.

Jeong quoted one of the defectors as saying that everyone had been “on the same page” about escaping to South Korea.  [AFP]

You can read more at the link.

South Koreans are asking their citizens to not eat at North Korean sponsored restaurants overseas to cut hard currency going to the Kim regime.  Should the US government takes this mentality a step forward and ban travel to North Korea by its citizens to also cut hard currency going to the regime, not to mention stopping the constant trickle of American detainee issues that have to be dealt with:

South Koreans’ stomachs are the latest front in the standoff with North Korea.

South Koreans have been told not to eat at North Korea’s restaurants around the world, although such visits aren’t illegal, the South’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.

Most of the restaurants are in China, and Chinese and other nationalities frequent them more than South Koreans do, so analysts see little impact. But the move is symbolic of a tougher stance from the South since North Korea’s nuclear test last month and its recent rocket launch, which many outsiders see as a banned test of ballistic missile technology.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link.

It seems to me that an app developer is well within their rights to charge a commission based on what the market demands.  No one is forcing these restaurant owners to use their app service.  The owners could always take the time to learn app development themselves:

Kim Seong-ah, a 27-year-old fashion designer, loved the idea of ordering food through an app without having to leave her couch.

But she had an unsatisfactory experience with one service six months ago. Her meal from the franchise Nene Chicken, one of the choices on the app she was using, was late and the portion was smaller than what she gets when she orders from the company directly by phone.

When Kim spoke to her friends and her brother, she discovered that they had had similar experiences. She found clues on why from various news articles, which reported that some merchants deliberately provide a poorer service for app users in order to make up for the losses incurred by the fees the platforms levy.

The country’s top three food-delivery apps – Baedal Minjok, Yogiyo and Baedaltong – charge restaurant owners between 2.5 percent to 12.5 percent of commission per order.

The flare-up over the app-based delivery system is the latest testament to the fact that advanced technology meant to increase convenience can cause unexpected consequences for different parties.

In this case, the controversy stems from the fact that the apps have come up with their own charges without seeking a fair agreement with users and restaurants, critics say.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link, but restaurant owners now want the Korean government to get involved to force a fair fee for the app developers’ services.  If the customers keep getting poor products from app ordering then they will go back to using the telephone thus decreasing the demand for the app.  This is what would naturally force the app developers to drop their prices without government intervention.

Via a reader tip comes this story of a Korean-American restaurant owner in New York who was treating his illegal immigrant employees as if they were Kaesong Industrial Complex workers:

During the busiest banquet season at Kum Gang San, a venerable 24-hour Korean restaurant in Flushing, Queens, employees said they often worked more than 16 hours, with no overtime, and earned less than the minimum wage. When times were slow, workers had to shovel snow from the owner’s driveway and move the owner’s son to a new apartment.

But the final indignity that prompted employees to file a lawsuit in 2012 came after workers were told to pick cabbage at a farm outside the city on their day off. When they refused, the workers said, they were suspended.

Last Thursday, a federal magistrate judge ruled that Kum Gang San, the owner, Ji Sung Yoo, and two restaurant managers owed the 11 employees who had filed a lawsuit claiming wage theft $2.67 million.

“I do see this as a victory because this lawsuit, yes, was about getting the money we were owed, but it was also about changing conditions,” Chul Park, 47, one of the plaintiffs, said through an interpreter on Sunday outside the restaurant. “Even though I am no longer working here, I know that this is going to impact the workers who are here now.”

The case is the latest involving an ethnic restaurant that has been found to exploit workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants from the same country as the restaurant bosses.

A federal magistrate judge, Michael H. Dolinger, wrote in his decision that Kum Gang San not only persisted in paying employees “grossly substandard wages and diverting some of their tip income, but — in violation of statutes and regulations — they made sure to deny the workers any information that would disclose the violations of their rights.”  [New York Times]

You can read more at the link, but Ji Sung Yoo has had a long history of exploiting employees so it is about time this ruling came out against him.