Activist Lawyers Call For UN Intervention in Samsung’s Occupational Disease Crisis

On Sept. 25, MINBYUN, activist lawyers’ group, and SHARPS held a joint press conference at the Samsung corporate headquarters, calling for UN intervention in the Samsung occupational disease cluster. Source: Minbyun

MINBYUN, or Lawyers for a Democratic Society, filed allegations letters with the Special Producers of Human Rights Council of the UN on Sept. 25, seeking intervention in Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s and the South Korean government’s inaction toward the deadly occupational disease cluster at the world’s largest chipmaker.

Lawyers’ Concerns

In three separate letters, drawing on data provided by SHARPS, MINBYUN enumerated concerns about the disease cluster, ranging from consistent failures by Samsung to protect employees from hazardous chemicals, to time-consuming and costly regulatory loopholes that help financially ruin the victims and their families.

“Indulged in speedy production of products, [Samsung] did not conduct training on the danger of the chemical substance and the necessity of protecting devices and did not provide sufficient protective devices,” MINBYUN alleged.

The activist lawyers raised concerns about shortcomings at Korea Workers’ Compensation & Welfare Service (KCOMWEL), the quasi-government entity responsible for workers compensation.  “Some of the victims who were rejected for industrial accident victim’s status are appealing in administrative courts asking for the status by KCOMWEL. But even when the administrative courts recognize the victims’ industrial accident status, KCOMWEL is not complying with the decisions,” the group said.

The Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, part of the UN Office of the High Commissioner For Human Rights, consist of human right experts reporting and advising on human rights from a country- and theme-specific perspective.  As of April 2013, the Procedures are under 36 thematic and 13 country mandates, according to its website.

On MINBYUN 

Founded in 1988, MINBYUN is South Korea’s largest activist lawyers’ group, focused on labor, environmental and peace issues.  The group provides consultation to the UN Economic and Social Council.

On SHARPS

As of March 2012, SHARPS has profiled 155 workers who contracted various forms of leukemia, multiple sclerosis, and aplastic anemia after employment in the electronics industry in South Korea.   As of June 2, 2012, 63 of the 155 have died.  The majority of the workers, 138, were employed at Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDS—the three electronics affiliates of the Samsung Group, the country’s largest conglomerate.  Among the 63 deaths were 56 Samsung employees.

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Seoul National University Shelves Plans to Appoint Former Samsung Executive As Visiting Scholar

A series of protests and petitions has stopped Seoul National University from hiring Hwang Chang-gyu, former semiconductor chief of Samsung, as visiting scholar.

After protests by SHARPS and student groups on campus, the Sociology department of Seoul National University (SNU) has reneged on plans to hire a former Samsung executive as a visiting scholar.

The SNU sociology faculty requested the university administration discontinue “administrative procedures” to appoint Hwang Chang-gyu, CEO of Samsung’s semiconductor unit between 2004 and 2008, to the cushy position, the department said in a statement posted on its website Jan. 21.

Hwang was once internationally famous for doubling memory chip capacity every year between 2002 and 2008. Hwang’s stint as head of Samsung’s semiconductor unit also is also infamous for a big push on production speed and volume at the cost of workplace safety.

Hwang Yumi, the first leukemia victim who came out against Samsung, was hired at the Samsung chip unit in 2003 when Hwang Chang-gyu began his big push on speed and volume.  In 2005, she was diagnosed with leukemia.  In 2007, Yumi died at the age of 23.  Her family’s public outcry led to the formation of SHARPS.

The month-long attempt at Hwang’s hiring inspired protests at one of South Korea’s most prestigious colleges, from law school to the department seeking to bring him in-house.  The sociology faculty found itself under public pressure and only grudgingly renounced the plans.  “We feel deeply responsible and offer a sincere apology to Dr. Hwang [Chang-gyu] for the abnormal end to his hiring,” said the faculty in the statement.

The faculty went on to pontificate:  “We express concerns about the bias expressed in statements by students.  Interpreting Dr. Hwang’s hiring as a move to desert labor and side with capital cannot rescue sociology from the 20th century paradigm.”

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An International Medical Journal: SHARPS’s Data Strongly Suggest Causal Link Between Chemical Exposures and Samsung Workers’ Malignancies

International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health ran a picture of Hwang Yu-mi, one of 53 victims of the leukemia cluster at Samsung, and her father on the cover of the summer 2012 issue.

Data presented by SHARPS strongly suggest, but do not yet prove, a causal link between chemical exposures in the process of semiconductor production and the malignancies developed by workers in the industry, two medical researchers said in an editorial for the summer 2012 issue of International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.

The summer 2012 issue of IJOEH also published a paper entitled “Leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in semiconductor industry workers in Korea,” which studied blood-disorder victims of South Korea’s semiconductor industry as profiled by SHARPS.

Samsung must disclose more information about chemicals employed in semiconductor production and the characteristics of workers who have and who have not developed blood disorders to conclusively determine a causal link, Mira Lee, of Physicians for Humanism, a South Korean medical advocacy group, and Howard Waitzkin, of the University of New Mexico, said.

The researchers noted:  “Samsung, the world’s largest information technology and electronics corporation (as measured by revenues), has refused to make public such data concerning the industrial processes that affect electronics workers and has impeded attempts by independent researchers to obtain essential information.”

Indeed, the lack of information narrowed the sample size and hampered the researchers’ ability to statistically associate the cancer cluster at Samsung with toxic exposures.  The editorial said:  “Due to this methodological challenge of proving causality with small numbers of cases, clusters of cancer like those that have appeared among Samsung workers may not receive the urgent attention and action that they deserve.”

The editorial also pointed to Samsung’s longstanding anti-unionism and its top-down, centralized corporate governance:  “[Samsung’s] long-standing policy that prohibits union organizing has attracted critical attention. Samsung’s overall corporate structure centralizes the policy-making that governs the activities of its vast network of subsidiary corporations. This centralization of decision making has received critical assessment even from investors concerned about the Samsung Group’s overall corporate efficiency.”

Finally, the editorial touted the activism of SHARPS, saying: “[SHARPS] researchers have pursued their work heroically, against tremendous obstacles erected by the Samsung Group and the government of South Korea. The researchers, who benefit from extensive training and experience in occupational health, bridge academia and a non-governmental organization that aims to improve occupational health conditions for electronics workers.”

As of March 2012, SHARPS has profiled 155 workers who contracted various forms of leukemia, multiple sclerosis and aplastic anemia after employment in the electronics industry in South Korea.  As of June, 2012, of the 155, 63 have died.  The majority of the workers, 138, were employed at Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDS—the three electronics affiliates of the Samsung Group, the country’s largest conglomerate.  Among the 63 deaths were 56 Samsung employees.

The study, Leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma in semiconductor industry workers in Korea,” can be downloaded for U$48.

The IJOEH editorial, A heroic struggle to understand the risk of cancers among workers in the electronics industry: the case of Samsung, can be downloaded free of charge.

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The Girls Who Got On The Bus Bound For Samsung

The majority of the 56 victims of the blood disorder cluster at Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. were vocational high school graduates from poor families in small cities.  They went to work at Samsung in the late 1990s when South Korea boasted one of the world’s highest college enrollment rates, 61 percent.  Before the victims fell to a variety of blood disorders, Samsung, which was on its way to become the world’s largest chipmaker, was their source of pride and opportunity.  On July 9, Hankyoreh 21, one the county’s few independent weeklies, profiled four victims from the small city of Kunsan in a cover story.  The following is a translation of the report [All brackets are added]:           

The July 9, 2012 issue of Hankyoreh 21

Sitting quietly on the edge of Kum River, the southwestern city of Kunsan was a bustling port city under Japanese colonial rule of 1910-45 when it was a conduit for the Japanese to siphon rice off the Korean peninsula.  The colonial master called the city Kunsan of rice.  In the 1960s-80s, largely left out of South Korea’s fervent industrialization, Kunsan’s wealth declined.  For young girls living in a city whose skyline is still dominated by colonial edifices and floating piers, working at Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., was a giant leap forward.

The four former Samsung Electronics employees, Yun Seul –ki and Yi Ah-young,  both 31 years old; Kim Mi-seon, 32 years old; and Chung Ae-jeong, 35 years old, went to the same Kunsan high school.  Yun and Yi are class 2000. Kim is class 1998 and Chung class 1996. They all spent least a year together with one or two of the other girls at Gunsan Girls Commercial High School, perhaps singing together the refrain of their school anthem: “My proud Gunsan Girls Commercial High.” About a decade later, Yun died.  Yi is suffering the aftereffects of surgery. Kim is on her sickbed.  Chung lost her husband to a disease he contracted while employed at Samsung.  Their medical conditions are: severe aplastic anemia; intermediate tumors in the head and neck; multiple sclerosis; and leukemia. It is unlikely that other Gunsan graduates share the bitter fate. Each contracted the disease while working at the Samsung LCD plant in Chonan or the semiconductor lab, and the LCD plant in Kiheung.

Over the gate of Gunsan Girls Commercial, a banner flies to congratulate recent graduates on their first jobs. Six are employed as operators at a Samsung Mobile Display plant in Chonan. About thirty have jobs at other semiconductor makers.

Even before graduation, the girls left home to partake in production of semiconductors, locally dubbed “the rice of industry.”  In the cleanroom, no speck of dust was allowed.  They stripped off their school uniforms and slipped into dirt-free garments covering themselves from head to toe.  They covered their long or short hair, and their brown eyes were exposed, still sparkling.  The rice of industry began to engulf the young girls from a small and old vocational school.

Yi began work at Samsung in June 1996, about a month later than Yun.  Yi still vividly remembers the day she entered the company fifteen years ago.  For a vocational school girl of a small city, working at the world’s biggest electronics maker was the source of pride.  Without standout academic credentials, one could not land a job at Samsung.  A year prior to her employment, Only 40 out of 100 applicants from her school received employment offers.

Samsung sent interviewers to the school.  Three interviewers interviewed about seven applicants together. “Semiconductor jobs were popular because they paid well, and had good dormitories.  I wanted a Samsung job because I wanted to make a lot of money,” said Yi.  A month later, she got on board the bus sent by Samsung for its in-house training facility.  Only five of her 47-student homeroom class landed Samsung jobs. .

Yi was posted as operator to the chemical vapor deposition process, in which she used chemical gas to add dopants to a pure semiconductor to modify its electrical properties.  Working on a three-daily shift was not easy to manage.  She had skin rashes and even collapsed. “My health got worse very much.  I found it hard to get adjusted to the company,” said Yi.  She resigned as operator in April 2002. The following year, she went to college.

She often became sick for no particular reason.  She felt exhausted, as if falling victim to a severe flu.  “Once I got sick, it lasted a month,” Yi said.  During four months a year in those years, she felt feeble.  She thought it was a tough flu to beat.  She took medicines and saw a doctor.  The illness continued to hound her even after college graduation.

It was the summer of 2009 when she began to see doctors at big hospitals in Seoul. They found intermediate tumor glands in her neck and head.  One of her doctors described them as glands in her nervous system.  “The condition is so rare that there are three patients with it a year,” Yi quoted her doctor as saying. Yi said, “I had the tumors removed quickly.  I suffered facial paralysis.”  The facial paralysis has become less severe, and she now works at a new job.

Yi believes she developed the tumors while employed at the semiconductor plant.  “A senior colleague of mine, who was a line inspector, collapsed with a foaming mouth.  Much later, I came to know that one predecessor had died of leukemia,” she said. “In 2000, when I was an operator, there was a blackout.”  There were concerns about possible chemical leaks during the blackout.  Yi has considered filing a request for workers’ compensation, but she did not file it.  “They don’t recognize even the dead ones.  Why would they grant my request?  I feel fortunate that I got out of there [Samsung] alive.”

Yi had not been in contact with Yun since graduation.  She came to know of the death of Yun, when interviewed by Hankyoreh 21.  “We were dying to work at Samsung.  I didn’t know all ended this way

Yun is the 56th victim of blood disorder clustering in the semiconductor industry as profiled by SHARPS.  She died at a Seoul hospital on June 2.  “I will live in Japan.”  This Yun often said to her mother.  A Kunsan native, Yun wanted to go to college in Japan.  She thought herself Japanese.  Yun was a fan of SMAP, a Japanese teenage pop band.  Thirteen years of struggling with severe aplastic anemia has deterred her dream.

Yun wanted to go to a prep school to improve her chances for college.  However, at the request of her mother, Shin, she went to Gunsan Girls Commercial, a high school whose graduates often land good industry jobs.

In May 1999, ahead of graduation, Yun applied for a position at Samsung.  A month later, she began to work at the LCD plant in Chonan.  Shin was proud of her daughter for working at a big corporation.  Yun was responsible for cutting chemically glazed LCD panels into size.  When Shin asked Yun about her job, she always indifferently said, “I am just a factory girl.”  The mother said, “I did not expect her to work on a blue-collar job at Samsung when she was employed at the company.”

Five months into the job, Yun fell on the factory floor.  She thought it was a flu, the one that got worse.  She did not get better.  Yun was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, a condition where bone marrow does not produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells.  Yun, herself a regular blood donor since high school, was an unlikely victim of the disease.  Her long fight against it began.  In 2002, she could nevertheless begin to study Japanese at a local college.

Her condition grew worse.  She stayed home longer, passing time by reading Murakami and other Japanese fiction.  Learning news that a former Samsung employee would receive workers compensation for aplastic anemia, she decided to file the request.  But her time ran out.  She died in May.

Kim is two years senior to Yi and Yun.  In 1997, she began to work as an operator in another LCD plant of Samsung.  She went through what the other two experienced two years sooner.  It was March 2000 when she became sick, about six months apart from Yun.  Kim is under treatment in Seoul for multiple sclerosis and optic neuritis.  Multiple sclerosis, the cause of which is yet unknown, can be caused by exposure to hazardous chemicals and excessive stress.  It damages the myelin sheath, which in turn slows down or blocks messages between the brain and body.  Kim is visually impaired because of the optic neuritis.

“They paid me 10, 000 won (US$10) in stipends after the interview.  I was so happy,” Kim said.  About 100 girls from her class went to work at Samsung’s LCD plants.  “It was during the 1997 financial meltdown [in the country].  There were fewer jobs going around.  I was glad to get selected by a big corporation with good pay,” she added.  She was hired in June 1996 and deployed to a soldering job after months of training.  “At first, I was responsible for soldering taps on LCD panels after cleaning them.  After a year, I was responsible for lead soldering,” she said.

After three years into employment, she became paralyzed on the left side of her body.  She could not lift the left arm anymore.  There is no history in her family of any such condition.

In March 2000, she took medical leave.  Her condition worsening, Kim eventually resigned from the company.  “Mother wanted me to seek workers’ compensation.  I opposed it.” She said. “I believed I could get back to work.  The company said my workers compensation request would not likely be accepted because the illness was caused for personal reasons.”

She went in and out of hospital as the condition of sclerosis fluctuated.  She lost vision in the right eye.  With her left eye, she can barely read large fonts on the computer screen.  Last year, Kim filed a request for workers compensation with the help of SHARPS, which she came to know through news reports.  “I did lead soldering, and air purifiers were often non-functional.  I sometimes wore only a paper mask.  We did not know how hazardous our jobs were,” she added.  She still collects prescriptions every two months.  She regularly has to undergo antibody and blood tests.  “I would have not worked at a semiconductor factory should I have known it was such a place.”

The memory chip industry experienced a great boom in 1995.  The release of Windows 95 boosted prices of memory chips.  Chung, a mother of two, is now a preschool teacher in the city of Siheung.  A Gunsan Girls Commercial graduate, she is a victim of the occupational disease cluster at Samsung. She lost her husband, himself an employee of the company, to leukemia.

Chung followed in the footsteps of her sister, who went to work at Samsung after graduation of the same high school.  “If you did not find a white-collar job in Kunsan, then Samsung is the next on your list,” she said.  In October 1995, Chung was employed as an operator at the plant in Kiheung.   Many of the young girls feared leaving home to work elsewhere.  Samsung’s well-appointed dormitories eased the fears.  “They even considered our conduct records.  They preferred upstanding students without truancy and cutting records.” Chung said.  About 150 graduates including her landed jobs at Samsung.

Three years into Samsung, she met Hwang Min-woong, an engineer, during a company choir practice.  They got married.  In 2004, Hwang was taken to the ER for flulike symptoms.  .He was diagnosed with leukemia.  Nine months later, he died while awaiting marrow donations.  It was ten days after Chung gave birth to their second child.  The company said the disease had nothing to do with Samsung.  She has continued to work at Samsung.   Chung’s story is depicted in A Clean Room.  She helps former Samsung employees to file requests for workers compensation,

On June 27, 2012 afternoon, girls began to pour from the gate of Gunsan Girls Commercial, bursting laughs as any teenager girls would.  Over the gate, a banner flies to congratulate recent graduates on their first jobs.  Six are employed as operators at a Samsung Mobile Display plant in Chonan.  About thirty have jobs at other semiconductor makers.  When asked what they know about working conditions at Samsung, some students answered, “We’ve been talking about it.  It’s dangerous to work there, but Samsung is still Samsung.  They pay well.”

“Samsung used to employ graduates in busloads,” one girl said.  “There are not many openings at Samsung.  They don’t have money either.”  Another concluded, “We came to a commercial high school because we want jobs after graduation.  There are not many jobs going around in Kunsan.”

“There are few well-paying jobs in Kunsan,” school sources said. “The students tend to favor the operator positions.”  Lee, the former homeroom teacher of Yun and Yi, said, “In 1999, after the financial crisis, when jobs were scarce, we found Samsung’s mass hiring encouraging.”

“We did not have any awareness or information about the danger of semiconductor and LCD production,” said assistant superintendent Park.  “It is very deplorable to see my students suffering.”

Leukemia and other cancers don’t require working at Samsung Electronics.  However, it is unusual for a disease to cluster at the same production line of the same plant in the same period.  The working conditions ten years ago at the production line that no longer exists is the point of contention between Samsung and former employees over whether to determine their medical conditions are occupational diseases.  Samsung and the government focus on the now-disintegrated production line, while the victims point to the decrepit machines used on the line.

“We deplore the death of Yun, a former colleague of ours,” said a Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. spokesperson.  However, he categorically denied any relationship between her disease and her job.  “Yun worked for just six months, including four months of apprenticeship.  She was responsible for mechanical operations, which did not require chemical processing.  Pre-employment health screening was not thorough enough to detect the symptoms of her condition,” the spokesperson said.  Countering Samsung, Yi Jong-ran, labor attorney with SHARPS, said: “Chemicals could have entered the air when Yun cut LCD panels.  Aplastic anemia has a short incubation phase and be caused by a short exposure to [hazardous materials].”

Concerning Yi and Kim, the Samsung spokesperson said, “The occurrences of the diseases should be measured against the number of graduates.  It does not appear scientific when you combine two different diseases to create causality because the two former employees went to the same school.”  Asked to measure the occurrences in a particular place, during a particular process and in a particular period, he answered that it made little sense.

Samsung proposed a public examination.  “SHARPS disclosed 137 workers whom it says have come out.  Their identities are not disclosed, and they came down to a disease at differing points of time. If who they are, what diseases to which they came down and what line of production they were are disclosed, we can examine their cases together,” said the spokesperson.  Says attorney Lee, “The Samsung Health Research Institute [a health research arm of Samsung Electronics] has proposed dialogue.  However, Samsung used money to stop the workers from requesting workers compensation and to drop lawsuits.  They did not do anything to build trust.  What dialogue is possible, given the situation?”

On June 14, Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee paid respects at the mortuary of four Samsung C&T employees who were killed in a helicopter crash in Peru.  He told the conglomerate to revamp safety measures for Samsung employees working overseas.  There are fifty-six mortuaries the tycoon passed by.  A lack of dirt, all white, is not necessarily clean.  The girls’ dirt-free suits were dreadfully white.

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International Activists Protest Samsung’s Inaction Toward Occupational Disease Crisis

Dozens of sustainability activists and labor-rights advocates from across the globe rallied at Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.’s headquarters in Seoul on June 20th, protesting inaction by the world’s largest electronics maker toward the occupational disease crisis at its plants.

About thirty international activists, who just wrapped up a three-day conference called Global Meeting on a Sustainable Electronics Industry,  joined pickets mounted by bereaved families of the workers who died of a variety of blood disorders which they allegedly contracted during employment with Samsung Electronics and its subsidiaries.

Activists from the U.S., China, Indonesia, Mexico and other nations carried pickets written in their native languages.  “We Want Green Phones, Not Killer Phones,” one English picket read.  “No More Deaths at Samsung,” read a sign in Spanish.

“During the past three days [of the conference] we have come to better understand that electronics workers are facing similar issues globally, against electronics giants,” Lee Jong-ran, a certified labor attorney with SHARPS, said, emphasizing the need for international solidarity.  “There was an outbreak of occupational disease at IBM factories in the Silicon Valley in the 1980s.  The same outbreak is now taking place at Samsung, and it will be likely happening in other parts of the world. ”

“[At the conference] we made a resolution to spread the word to every part of the world about the horrid march of death unfolding at Samsung,” she concluded.

A sudden summer rain did not dampen the spirits of solidarity .   “I wish for the agonies of Samsung victims to go away, and for the tears of their families to dry, just like a rain that has just come and gone,” Kong Jeong-ok, an MD with SHARPS, said in a voice choked with grief.

In related development, on June 19, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, an independent government human rights watchdog, filed a non-binding request with the South Korean government, calling for the Ministry of Employment and Labor to require employers to prove non-causality between employees’ working conditions and their diseases in order to deny requests for workers compensation.

Global Meeting on a Sustainable Electronics Industry took place outside Seoul on June 18-20, joined by representatives of more than thirty-six activist groups from ten countries.

SHARPS, Asia Monitoring Resource Centre of Hong Kong, Citizen of The Earth Taiwan, Good Electronics and the International Campaign for Responsible Technology jointly hosted the conference.

Dozens of global labor and sustainability activists on June 20 joined the bereaved families of Samsung victims mounting protests.

As of March 2012, SHARPS has profiled 155 workers who contracted various forms of leukemia, multiple sclerosis and aplastic anemia after employment in the electronics industry in South Korea.

As of June 2, 2012, of the 155, 63 have died.  The majority of the workers, 138, were employed at Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDS—the three electronics affiliates of the Samsung Group, the country’s largest conglomerate.  Among the 63 deaths were 56 Samsung employees.

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Another Samsung Worker Dies Of Blood Disorder

Another Samsung woman worker has lost her life to an occupational disease, the existence of which her employer still denies, and on which her government has turned its back.

Yun Seul-ki, 32 years old, died of aplastic anemia, the condition that she has been struggling for 13 years since she was 18.

Yun was taken to hospital last month, after experiencing necrosis of more than 70 percent of her hip joint.  Her death marks her as the 56th Samsung victim and the fourth in this year.

In November 1999, the 18-year-old Yun collapsed on the cleanroom floor, where for the previous five months she had been cutting chemically glazed liquid crystal display (LCD) panels.  In December of that year, diagnosed with aplastic anemia, she was asked to leave the job.

In the cleanroom of Samsung Electronics’ plant in the city of Chonan, the only protective gear that stood between her and hazardous chemicals were thin cotton gloves.  With bare eyes, she inspected the panels for cracks and cut them into size.  She said the room was always full of glass dust and chemical odors.

Yun lived through her twenties, helped by frequent blood transfusions.   She and her mother relied on $400-a-month government handouts for poor families.  Chronic poverty meant that she stood little chance of finding a marrow donor.

In April 2012, Samsung Electronics spun off the LCD unit, where Yun was employed, into a separate company, Samsung Display Co.  The spinoff is already the world’s biggest LCD maker.

Yun did not have a family history of blood disorder.  She passed the mandatory physical and medical exam performed on prospective employees at Samsung.

It just took a healthy young girl less than six months at Samsung to become fatally ill.  It pains us to ask how long and how many deaths it will take for Samsung and the South Korean government to act to put an end to the tragedy wrought on the young workers and their families.

As of March 2012, SHARPS has profiled 155 workers who contracted various forms of leukemia, multiple sclerosis and aplastic anemia after employment in the electronics industry in South Korea.

Yun Seul-ki’s family members enter into the ICU where she was pronounced dead–after 13 years of suffering from aplastic anemia. Her family wants to withhold  pictures of her.

As of June 2, 2012, of the 155, 63 have died.  The majority of the workers, 138, were employed at Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDS—the three electronics affiliates of the Samsung Group, the country’s largest conglomerate.  Among the 63 deaths were 56 Samsung employees.

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The Comic Book Ads That Money Can’t Buy

An attempt by an independent publisher to get the word out about more than a hundred victims of occupational diseases at Samsung has hit an unexpected snag, after most of South Korea’s handful of independent media outlets refused to take advertisements for a set of two comic books about the outbreak of a variety of blood disorders at Samsung’s electronics affiliates.

As of March 2012, SHARPS has profiled 155 workers who contracted various forms of leukemia, multiple sclerosis and aplastic anemia after years of employment in the electronics industry in South Korea.

Of the 155, 62 have died.  The majority of the workers, 138, were employed at Samsung Electronics, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDS—the three electronics affiliates of the Samsung Group, the country’s largest conglomerate.  Among the 62 deaths were 55 Samsung employees.

In April 2012, Bori Publication Co., Ltd. approached about six independent print and online publications to place ads for two comics, The Smell of Humanity and A Dustless Room.  Only two publications, online daily Pressian and independent daily Hankyoreh’s Internet TV unit Hani TV, took the ads.  One publication rejected the ad after the publisher refused to remove references to Samsung from copy.  Another publication rejected it, citing a conflict of interest between sponsors because Samsung is also a sponsor.  A third publication demanded high premiums for the ads.

Samsung controls the lion’s share in the advertisement market.  According to a survey, in 2008 the Samsung Group made up 40 percent of a total marketing and advertisement expenses of the country’s ten largest chaebols, or family-owned conglomerates.

Paradoxically, their financial vulnerability often leaves smaller and independent media more susceptible to Samsung’s pressure, tacit or otherwise.  In fairness, the six publications ran favorable reviews of the two comic books.

The Smell of Humanity is about the father of a 21-year-old woman worker who died of leukemia after having working for two years at a semiconductor lab of Samsung Electronics.

A Dustless Room is about how Samsung’s clean rooms, where semiconductors are produced in an isolated environment, were designed and run to protect the integrity of chips at the cost of the workers’ safety.

The Smell of Humanity and A Clean Room, the two comic books about victims of occupational diseases at Samsung

Bori and SHARPS are relying on word of mouth and Twitter for the promotion of the books.  The Smell of Humanity and A Dustless Room currently rank second and third on the top 100 comic books on Aladdin.co.kr, one of South Korea’s largest online bookstores.

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