President
Chairman
"The great leader Comrade
His boundlessly noble love for our people can be seen from the story that he took a measure to blow up a primary furnace shop of (then) Songjin Steel Works in the period of building a new country.
President
He headed to the primary furnace shop built by a capitalist of the Japanese imperialists on the cemetery on the beach before the liberation, where the Korean workers used to be forced to toil in the choking atmosphere full of gas, smoke, dust and hot air.
The Japanese imperialists had installed an underground distribution board with high-voltage cable buried beneath the floor of the shop, so a great many workers were shocked to death by electricity every day.
The primitive furnace shop which was aimed to plunder more iron at lower cost was indeed a death trap for the Korean workers.
An official of the plant dissuaded the President from entering the shop because it was harmful and dangerous.
Saying that he had no reason not to go in where our workers were toiling, for the shop was an important unit for the first process of steel production at this plant, the President went into the shop.
The shop was full of the primitive furnaces like checkered board and filled with iron and anthracite dust, which made it difficult to distinguish anything clearly.
The shrill arcing sound of carbon rods was audible from the furnaces and the glare flashed like lightning. The smelters were swirling the molten iron with long iron hooks or hurriedly pouring the raw materials in front of the furnace.
As can be seen from this, it was so dangerous. However, raw materials of steel for electric furnaces were produced here, so the officials and workers of the plant were still maintaining the shop.
The President saw the smelters working in front of the furnace shop where the simmering molten iron was blasting and said in a resentful tone that in the past, the Japanese imperialists, crafty and malignant, were only concerned about producing steel at lowest possible cost, taking no account of the fatal risks for the Koreans working there.
He said that before the liberation, our workers had been forced to work at this dangerous place at the risk of their lives because they had no country of their own but now that the country had been liberated and they had become the masters of the country, why they would still had to work in such a hazardous place. Adding that however precious steel would be, steel could never be bartered for our workers' lives, he talked to the officials that they had to close down the shop, thrice cursed by our workers.
He stressed the need to pay attentions to ways of feeding the workers properly, in addition to providing them with safe working conditions, adding that as they were constantly suffering from excessive heat, the metallurgical workers had to eat a lot of meat and fish.
He also said warmly that he was going to send them a fishing boat, with which to catch and supply plenty of fish for the workers, ensuring that the plant should supply meat and fish to the workers on a regular basis.
He made the whole round of the works that day, indicating the ways of the works to be followed. Only when he emphasized to the officials again that the furnace shop should be closed down without fail, did he leave the works.
The workers of the furnace shop were overflowing with gratitude and ardent loyalty to the President, astonished to hear the news of removal of the shop where they used to shed tears of blood.
The officials of the works and workers of the furnace shop continued to operate the furnace with a resolve to repay his loving care with more steel production, insisting that the furnace could never be stopped before a new steel-making process was studied.
The President visited again the Songjin Steel Works on June 8, Juche 37 (1948) after being told that the primitive furnaces were still in operation.
He headed first towards the primitive furnace shop on the way to the Steel Works and was so heartbroken to see the smelters removing the material steel in a backbreaking way from the furnace shop that he had a shadow pass over his face. He asked the officials why they had not closed down the shop yet.
Hearing that they were going to remove the shop step by step after they studied a new steel-making process, he said that all the workers should be valued and saved, and took a measure to close down the shop and left the factory.
He kept feeling so worried about the primitive shop that later he saw to it that it blew up without any trace.
The massive structures of five primitive furnace shops, with a thundering explosion rocking the earth and the sky, were blown up in the mushroom-shaped flames and the high-voltage cables laid under the ground scattered far and wide.
A blown-up primitive furnace shop!
It was a historic event that wiped out the traces of the Japanese imperialists' colonial industry which had been bleeding the workers white and depriving of their lives for the sake of their profit, and showed the world what a genuine world of working class would be like.
President
