Samsung Accused Of Labor Rights Violations In China

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and its Chinese contractors hire underage workers and force their employees, underage or otherwise, to work excessive overtime in harsh working conditions, China Labor Watch, said in a new report released on Sept. 4.

In China, Samsung has a manufacturing network of a dozen directly owned factories and relationships with 250 contractors.  In May-August, CLW, the New York rights group, conducted undercover investigations into six directly owned factories and two contractors.

At least three directly owned facilities regularly hire underage workers.  At Tianjin Samsung Mobile Display Co., Ltd, Huizhou Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, and Shenzhen Samsung Kejian Mobile Telecommunication Technology Co., Ltd, each employing anywhere between 500-2,000 workers, workers under 18 years of age are required to do the same work as adults without extra protection or legal recourse.

Many of the children are students seasonally hired from local vocational schools.  Student workers have to pay Rmb800 (U$126) in upfront middleman fees, or about half a month’s wage, to be hired.  Students are encouraged by management and their teachers, who often work as middlemen, to forge their documents to pass as adults.  The illicit practice is also profiled in an investigative report by the independent daily Hankyoreh of Tianjin Samsung Mobile Display. 

Samsung at least admitted that there was a need for the company to have Chinese workers working overtime.  “We partly agree with the report that there are times when workers need to work overtime at some plants, especially when we launch new products or build new manufacturing lines,”  James Chung, a Samsung spokesman, told the Wall Street Journal.

Excessive working hours is common practice at the eight facilities.  Samsung and its suppliers flout a legally mandated 36-hour workweek and force workers to work more than 100 hours in unpaid overtime.

The worst is Tianjin Intops Co., Ltd, a supplier, where each of an all-women army of 1,200 contract workers has to work standing for 11 hours a day to assemble a cellular phone cast every five seconds.  At the peak of the production cycle, they must work up to 150 hours of overtime per month.

On its home turf of South Korea, Samsung employees are among the best paid.  However, Samsung’s negligence of its own workers is also well-documented.  SHARPS has to date profiled 56 workers who died of a variety of types of blood disorder and cancer  which they developed while employed at the company’s production facilities.

During a high-profile patent infringement lawsuit by Apple against Samsung, testimony by a Samsung designer of Smartphone icons, Wang Jeeyeun accidentally revealed how much the world’s largest electronics maker is addicted to the daily sacrifices of its overworking workers.

During the three-month period, in which she developed icons for Galaxy S, Samsung’s tablet, she said, “I slept about two or three hours a night.”  Ms. Wang had to stop breastfeeding her three-month-old infant to keep up with schedule.

CLW’s latest report was in line with its findings a month earlier of child labor at Samsung’s supplier, HEG Electronics in the city of Huizhou.  It dealt a fresh blow to Samsung because the report came out on the heels of an internal audit by Samsung which exonerated HEG of hiring underage labor.

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Samsung’s Chinese Supplier Employs Underage Workers

Young workers at HEG Electronics (Huizhou), Samsung’s Chinese contractor.

HEG Electronics (Huizhou), a Chinese contractor that assembles devices for Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd hired underage workers at its production facilities, according to a preliminary survey released on August 7 by China Labor Watch, a New York-based Chinese labor rights advocacy group.

Samsung’s Chinese partner forced the young workers to work the same excessive hours in the same harsh conditions, said the New York rights watchdog, while paying them 30 percent less than their adult colleagues. On the assembly lines for Samsung devices, workers, underage and adult alike, had to work standing for more than 11 hours a day.  On top of that they are only given a 40-minute break for meals, said the survey.  There are 28 discipline points that lead to management levying hefty penalties against the young workers who make an average of $1.27-$1.08 per hour.

In the survey it covertly conducted in June and July, CLW profiled seven child workers ranging in age from 14 to 16 and estimated that at least 50-100 child workers were employed on HEG/Samsung production lines.  HEG management was aware of the clear violations of local labor regulation in employing children and made attempts at covering them up.

Many underage workers worked as seasonally hired “interns.”  For student workers, there are no formal contracts, nor age verification.  School teachers helped forge documents or vouched for the underage hires to “serve their own interests,” according the survey.  Even after HEG managers discovered that some of its workers were underage, they continued to employ the children, and moved them to a rented dormitory outside the factory to hide them from outside inspection.

Indeed, HEG depends heavily on a cheap labor pool from local vocational schools for churning out DVDs, stereo systems, and MP3 players for Samsung.  During summer and winter vacations, 80 percent of its 2,000-strong workforce is students and 60% during the non-season.

Samsung provides fixed assets and other equipment to the Chinese contractor, the survey said.  More than 50 Samsung employees are posted to HEG production facilities.

However, Samsung pleaded ignorance of child labor at its Chinese contractor.  “Samsung Electronics has conducted two separate on-site inspections on HEG’s working conditions this year but found no irregularities on those occasions,” Nam Ki Yung, a Samsung spokesman, told Bloomberg News.  Samsung said it would send an investigation team to HEC, according to a tech news site, The Verge.

According to CLW, Samsung uses Intertek as its outside CSR auditor for contractors and suppliers.  CLW discredits Intertek’s trustworthiness, pointing to the fact that its inspectors took briberies from Chinese contractors.

Whether Intertek has audited HEG for Samsung in the past is unknown.  However, in 2011, in a move to dodge pressure from SHARPS and other labor advocates, Samsung commissioned Environ, a pro-business technical consultancy, to prove the lack of causality between the leukemia clusters at is semiconductor facilities and their working conditions.  Samsung did not provide reliable and comprehensive data.

Founded in 2000, CLW is an independent not-for-profit organization.  In 2010, CLW published reports on safety-lapse-caused explosions and a series of suicides by employees at Foxconn, the Chinese/Taiwanese contractor of Apple Inc.

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