Death of Samsung worker renews concerns

Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest technology company by sales, is facing renewed concerns about the working environment at its semiconductor plants after one of its factory workers recently died of leukaemia.

Samsung has strongly denied that the working environment in its factories has anything to do with a number of cancer cases among its employees over the past decade.

However, the controversy comes amid growing concerns over the poor safety records at some South Korean companies at a time when the country is seeing rapid industrial development.

Critics say that South Korean companies are focusing more on productivity and profitability than the health of their employees.

South Korean workers face some of the longest working hours in the developed world and the death rate from industrial accidents is far higher than in other advanced countries.

Samsung has long been plagued by allegations that toxic chemicals used for chip production caused leukaemia and other blood-related cancers in some of its factory workers.

In January a group of its employees, together with the bereaved families of former Samsung workers who died of leukaemia or lymphoma, filed an administrative lawsuit to seek compensation. They claimed that their diseases were caused by prolonged exposure to radiation and benzene in Samsung’s chip factories.

“Leukaemia is a rare disease, which strikes one out of 100,000 in ordinary conditions. There were repeated cases in Samsung’s factories, where people doing the same job on the same production line contracted the disease. It is hard to say that they were just coincidences,” said Baak Young-mann, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

The allegations drew public attention after Park Ji-yeon, a 23-year-old chip factory worker, died of leukaemia at the end of March. She was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that was filed against a government agency in charge of workers’ welfare, after it refused to pay any compensation to the workers.

Samsung said that since 1998, 22 of its employees who worked at its chip plants were diagnosed with leukaemia or lymphoma. Of those, 10 have died. The company has about 30,000 workers at its memory chip plants in the country.

This week Samsung broke its long-held silence, inviting reporters to a chip plant.

Cho Soo-in, president of Samsung’s memory division, said that there was no risk of getting cancer from working in the company’s semiconductor plants. Government probes, conducted in 2007 and 2008, found no direct link between employees’ illnesses and their working conditions.