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By Michelle Chen

JANUARY 13, 2016

High-Tech Manufacturing’s Disposable Workers

The electronics industry is poisoning the workers who make our

shiny gadgets.

T he global electronics industry boasts of technical

perfection and seamless production. But look closer and

you can spot assembly lines tangled with rotten nerve

endings and veins swollen with toxins. Workers of the high-

tech economy face hazards that echo the lethal smokestacks

of Dickensian England.

This time, however, it’s not Manchester where workers are

ailing, but the semiconductor capitals of the world in East

Asia. South Korea, which together with China leads the

Workers at SK Hynix plant in Icheon, South Korea, August 25, 2015. (Reuters / Kim Min-hee)

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world in production of brand-name electronics, has been

slowly awakening to the public health fallout of workplace

poisoning. Two of South Korea’s major semiconductor

producers, SK Hynix and Samsung, are coming under heavy

pressure to investigate and pay for an epidemic of

occupational illness that many trace back to their production

lines.

A 2014 analysis by Hankoryeah newspaper found that “at

least 13 people who worked at SK Hynix between 1995 and

2010 died of lympho-hematopoietic malignancies (five from

leukemia and five from non-Hodgkin lymphomas), while at

least 11 people working at the semiconductor division at

Samsung Electronics during the same period died of the

same diseases.”

At both SK Hynix and Samsung, over a 15-year period,

“around 80 people altogether fell ill with lympho-

hematopoietic diseases. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma rates were

particularly elevated among women.

Though proving a direct causal link to either of the firms is

difficult, SK Hynix is now moving forward with a

precautionary approach by implementing an independent

investigation committee’s recommendations for long-term

compensation. Advocates hope the measures will lead to

strengthened chemical safeguards across the manufacturing

process.

Meanwhile, the South Korea-based No More Deaths

campaign has for years sought to hold Samsung accountable

for a spate of cancers, which the group says has resulted in

more than 70 worker deaths. Although the company recently

relented to years of pressure from victims’ advocates by

allowing workers to apply for compensation from a special

$85.8 million fund, survivors have rejected the plan, arguing

that it has stonewalled victims, and that even the latest

promises of compensation and reform are whitewashed and

lacking transparency. They also object to the restrictions

Samsung sought to place on the fund, such as rules limiting

the number of diseases covered or requiring several years of

employment with the company.

The arbitration committee established by third-party experts

called for a more objective process with oversight from an

independently appointed ombudsman, and recommended

the inclusion of 12 additional diseases for compensation

claims.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s controversies may be eclipsed by a

parallel crisis in China. A recent Wired investigation revealed

alarming patterns of electronics workers reporting waves of

respiratory and neurological illness. Factory worker Long Li

described her rapid physical deterioration over just a few

months: going numb in her hands, then roiling joint paint,

and eventually, “Long found herself unable to move her legs.

‘I was just lying on my bed all day and needed help to eat.’”

Fair compensation from employers is rare, and China’s

anemic healthcare infrastructure is sorely lacking.

Though firm statistics are lacking on the scope of the

hazards, a 2013 public health survey of about 7,600

electronics workers found that “More than 60% of the female

workers self-reported occupation-related diseases.”

Often illnesses occurred in the workforces of shady supplier

factories that subcontract with brands like Apple and

Samsung. While tech giants tout “corporate social

responsibility” programs to improve supply-chain labor

conditions, Wired reports that health and safety may be

sidelined in the pursuit of basic wage-and-hour

improvements: “In many cases, companies have merely

pushed the problems outward from their own factories to

contractors and subcontractors, where compliance is more

difficult to enforce.”

Given the growing scale of the problem, the SK Hynix

settlement marks a relatively clean first step in redressing

occupational illnesses in tech. Jeong ok-Kong, an

occupational physician with South Korea-based Supporters

for the Health And Rights of People in the Semiconductor

Industry, tells The Nation via e-mail that SK Hynix’s

compensation framework could “be a good example on how

to address this type of problem in a socially-acceptable and

responsible way, especially in contrast to what Samsung has

done.” For example, the company ensured “social

communication and transparency” by including a civil

society group on the advisory committee and publicizing the

investigation’s results, and “respond[ed] quickly without

delaying the solution by repeated denial of the problem.”

The need for corporate transparency is a question of social

and workplace democracy. Garrett Brown, a workplace

health and safety specialist who previously worked with

California’s occupational health agency, says, “The right of

workers to know what they’re exposed to…is missing

throughout the industry and throughout the supply chains.”

Right-to-know laws in the US chemicals and processing

industries have led to regulatory breakthroughs and major

advocacy campaigns. Today, Asian workers—some of whom

constitute workforces that rival the population of a small

nation—remain in the dark about what they breathe and

touch every day at work.

To tech firms, protecting “product integrity” takes priority

over protecting human safety: “The production process has

never really been designed to protect workers, it’s always

been designed to protect the product,” Brown says. Routinely,

“workers are exposed to very high levels of toxic chemicals

which change all the time, many of which have never been

sufficiently studied as to what their effects are in human

beings.”

The problem lies in a production system that incentivizes

firms to ignore safety concerns to achieve what Brown calls

the “Iron Triangle”: ever-higher product value, ever-

accelerating production speeds, and ever-cheaper production

costs. The most convenient source of such “efficiencies” for

employers is naturally squeezing an increasingly exhausted,

overstretched workforce.

“So you pay them less, you have unpaid overtime, you pay as

little as possible for health and safety compliance or

environmental compliance,” Brown says, “and it’s all driven

by the sweatshop business model of global supply chains.”

But the bodies of workers are only so pliable until their

health finally gets spent. And as economic development

accelerates, the societies that have tried to prosper from

cheap tech manufacturing are now facing a devastating

public health debt.

Technology firms pride themselves on defining what’s cool

and cutting-edge, but until the workers in high-tech

sweatshops get some relief, no amount of Silicon Valley style

Michelle Chen Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation.

can gloss over the toxic substance fueling its profits.

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By Michelle Chen

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