On May 1 one year after liberation, President Kim Il Sung gave a banquet for the model workers throughout the country.

Kim Il Sung came to the banquet hall and shook hands with the workers. Grasping a coal miner’s stumpy hand, Kim Il Sung highly spoke of him as a pioneer in the new Korea who had already fulfilled the national economic plan worked out for the first time in Korea.

Kim Il Sung noted that the workers in coal and ore mines were the ones who lived in poverty being subjected to inhuman treatment and contempt under the Japanese colonial rule but they were regarded and held up as the most precious beings in the new Korea where workers and peasants became masters of country.

Then Kim Il Sung held two toast glasses in his hands and offered them to the coal miner whom he appraised as a pioneer of the new Korea and another coal miner from other coal mine, saying that it would be advisable to offer toasts to the coal-mine innovators, direct undertakers of industry in Korea.

Patting the coal miners, who were moved to tears, on the back, Kim Il Sung expressed his great confidence by saying that they are the pillars shouldering the future of their coal mines and he is looking forward to their increased coal production through emulation drive for increased production.