South Korea on Tuesday requested cooperation from local firms operating in the Kaesong Industrial Complex in dealing with North Korea's unilateral decision to raise wages for its workers.
In a meeting with the heads of 124 companies with factories in the zone, just north of the inter-Korean border, and 91 sales offices, a senior unification ministry official reaffirmed that Seoul would never accept Pyongyang's measure.
"You hold the key to resolving this incident. It is a matter that can be resolved if you join hands and go together with the government," Lee Kang-woo, chief of the ministry's Kaesong district development bureau, said in the session held in Seoul.
Last month, Pyongyang announced that it would increase the minimum wage for its workers in the joint venture from $70.35 to $74 starting in March.
Should the South's firms comply with the North's decision, which is not based on a mutual agreement, it would set a bad precedent, Lee stressed.
The government may even push for legal and administrative punishment against companies that accept the North's demand, Lee said.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen South Korean businessmen with factories in the Kaesong zone will visit the zone on Wednesday to meet the North's related officials, according to the ministry.
About 15 representatives from the council of those firms plan to deliver their position directly to the North, it said.
The North has rejected the South's repeated offer of government-level dialogue to discuss the wage problem and other pending issues on the operation of the Kaesong facilities, saying it is a matter associated with its sovereignty.
The communist nation has instead ratcheted up pressure on the South's firms.
The North's Central Special Development Guidance Bureau convened a meeting with the heads of the South's factories and offices in the Kaesong complex at 11 a.m. Tuesday, a ministry official told reporters on background.
They refused to attend it, however, at the request of the South Korean government, he said.
The South's firms, mostly small and medium-sized ones, employ about 53,000 North Korean workers in the complex created in 2004 to combine the North's cheap labor and the South's capital and technology. (Yonhap)
