Regarding Workers as More Precious Than Gold

One early morning in February 1953 when the Fatherland Liberation War was at its height. President Kim Il Sung visited a factory. It took a long time for him to look round all the workshops of the factory. Now officials asked him to have breakfast. He, however, said that he had not yet looked round the workers’ dormitory and dining hall. Mentioning that people working in the places would be disappointed if he left without going to see them, he told the officials that he would have breakfast after looking round them. Then he headed for the dining hall.

Observing foods on the table, he asked a worker for a ticket. Without knowing the reason the worker gave him one. He took it to the pass-through and asked for a meal. A cook in the kitchen was at a loss to know what to do. With a smile the President told the cook not to prepare a special meal for him but give him the same one as the workers ate. After finishing the meal at the same table with the workers he went into the kitchen where he took the lids off the soup pot and rice-cooking pot to look into them. And seeing soybeans soaked in a wooden basin, he recalled that during the anti-Japanese armed struggle they had been quite pleased to eat boiled ground bean after having a victorious battle with the Japanese imperialist aggressors. Then he told cooks in the kitchen to make boiled ground bean and bean curd and raise bean sprouts so as to supply the workers with highly nutritious non-staple foodstuffs using even a kind of material. Calling the cooks to his side, he said that the workers were more precious than gold and repeatedly stressed the need to pay greater attention to the work of equipping the dining hall in a sanitary and cultured way and improving the quality of the foods despite the difficult wartime conditions.

Later he had scores of tons of soybeans supplied to the factory so that they could raise bean sprouts.

Korean working people made locomotives and tractors with their own efforts.