hankyoreh

Gyeonggi Province

By Lim In-tack and Oh Seung-hun, staff reporters

“To be honest, hearing stories about Samsung workers coming down with leukemia makes me nervous. Chemicals aren’t good for you, right? I guess it would be strange if you didn’t get sick. But I’ve got to keep food on the table, so I go to work hoping I’ll be okay.”

The woman in her mid-thirties who a Hankyoreh reporter met on her way home around 2 pm seemed unconcerned as she spoke. She said that she was in her fourteenth year working as an operator on the semiconductor line at the SK Hynix factory in Bubal Township, Icheon, Gyeonggi Province.

High-rise apartment complexes and shopping centers are clustered around the factory here. Aside from the groups of workers going to and from work at 6 am, 2 pm, and 10 pm - the times when the three shifts at the factory change - the area looks much the same as any other normal town.

But working at a semiconductor factory does not appear to be normal. The workers at SK Hynix who met Hankyoreh reporters at the beginning of June cautiously shared the anxiety they keep hidden in their hearts. What follow is what a Hankyoreh reporter was told by a woman in her mid-thirties who has been working as an operator for more than ten years.

“About a year ago, I remember hearing that someone had left the company after coming down with cancer. In the past, I wouldn’t have thought much about this and just assumed it was another disease. But after the controversy about leukemia at Samsung, a lot of people are saying that it could be connected with workplace conditions. But people keep this sort of talk under wraps. No one wants to be pinpointed as someone who spreads rumors,” the woman said.

“During the ten or so years that I worked here after starting in the mid-1990s, I didn’t wear a safety mask even once,” said a man who was working on the production line until recently. “Since the automated equipment breaks down frequently, people have to take a look at that for several hours at a time. During that process, it was commonplace to be exposed to toxins.”

“They are currently investing in new equipment, but most of the old stuff was second-hand Japanese equipment that had been imported. It’s no wonder that the production process is so dangerous,” said another worker at SK Hynix.

Aug. 1. (by Ryu Woo-jong

Although SK Hynix is one of South Korea’s two largest manufacturers of semiconductors - along with Samsung Electronics - it has never really faced public scrutiny about leukemia and other industrial accidents connected with the disease. Samsung, on the other hand, came to public attention after Hwang Yu-mi, who had been working at a Samsung semiconductor plant, died of leukemia in 2007 at the age of 23.

Indeed, there is little reliable data available about the status of leukemia and other lympho-hematopoietic malignancies at the company, the main diseases that research has associated with the semiconductor industry.

Is there any basis to the fears of Hynix workers? Hankyoreh reporters found that in fact there is.

Using original research and data from government studies, the Hankyoreh found that at least 17 Hynix workers have died of lympho-hematopoietic malignancies, including leukemia, through July 27. Indeed, the most recent person to die of leukemia in the domestic semiconductor industry - an individual surnamed Song, 40, an equipment technician who passed away on Jan. 2013 - had been working for 22 years not at Samsung Electronics, but at SK Hynix.

Banollim, a watchdog group that supports the health and human rights of semiconductor workers, heard about a 37-year-old female operator who died of a malignant lymphoma in May 2013, and this woman had also been employed at Hynix. There are also workers who are fighting a lonely battle with the disease after leaving the company.

Furthermore, a comparison of official government data and Samsung Electronics (semiconductor division) shows that SK Hynix is right up there with Samsung in terms of the ratio and number of people who have died of lymphatic and cardiovascular diseases. 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 (seven from leukemia and three from non-Hodgkin lymphomas).

In addition, 28 people were diagnosed with lympho-hematopoietic cancer at both SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics during this period. Most of these cases do not overlap with those who died, meaning that around 80 people altogether were brought low by lympho-hematopoietic diseases at the two companies over the past 15 years.

This is the result of a comprehensive analysis of studies carried out by the Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Employment and Labor, on diseases and deaths among current and former workers of plants at the two companies for the periods 1995 to 2007 and 2008 to 2010.

The mortality rate per 100,000 workers between 1995 and 2007 was 15.3 people at Samsung Electronics and 18.2 at SK Hynix. Between 2008 and 2010, it was 5.2 people at Samsung Electronics and 6.5 at SK Hynix.

staff photographer)

One person increasing the mortality gap with Samsung was Jeong Cheol-mo, who died in Nov. 2008 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Jeong was 42 years old and in his thirteenth year as an employee of SK Hynix when he passed away.

Jeong’s bereaved family argue that the cause of his death was the toxic materials that he was frequently exposed to as an engineer during various experiments and research on the production line and research institutes, but the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service does not recognize the death as an industrial accident. The family has been waging a long and bitter lawsuit, just like families of former semiconductor workers at Samsung did several years ago.

Kim Jin-gi died of chronic myelomonocytic leukemia in May 2011 after working at Hynix and MagnaChip, its non-memory spinoff. Thirty-eight at the time, with a 14-year work history there, Kim was the first leukemia victim from a semiconductor plant to have his case recognized as an industrial accident by the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service (K-COMWEL), a verdict that came in May 2013. Now his family members are preparing a lawsuit to demand compensation from the company. It’s a way of driving the business’s responsibility home.

All of the family members who talked to Hankyoreh reporters confessed to being hurt by the company’s seemingly total lack of interest during the accident claim and lawsuit processes. Seven years after Samsung’s high-profile problems brought the issue of semiconductor-related illness to light, Hynix’s management and union both seemed to be more interested in covering things up. The company either can’t or won’t provide details on the number of diseases or fatalities. On July 13, Hynix told the Hankyoreh it was “difficult to get a grasp on what illnesses our current employees have, let alone our former ones, because the details of health insurance diagnoses are personal information.” According to the company, its most recent data are Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute (OSHRI) figures from 2007.

“The union hasn’t found a single fatal leukemia case to date,” the company’s union president, surnamed Park, told the Hankyoreh on July 9. “The company and the union are in agreement on this issue.”

This is eerily reminiscent of the early response at Samsung. There, things remained hush-hush as the list of victims and fatalities continued to grow and family members were forced to deal with sickness and death. In the end, the company only agreed to dialogue after years of outcry from victims and civic groups.

More noteworthy still, the number of lymphatic and hematopoietic diseases and deaths hasn’t dropped at either Hynix or Samsung. Data for 1995 to 2007 showed a total of 18 deaths from both types of illnesses at the two companies, or an average of 1.38 per year. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of deaths was six, for an annual average of two fatalities. The incidence of lymphatic or hematopoietic cancers also rose from 44 between 1995 and 2007, or an annual average of 3.38, to twelve in 2008-10, or four new cases per year.

The rise in non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases among female workers has been especially striking. At least eight cases were found at the two companies between 1995 and 2007. The OSHRI concluded at the time that the incidence rate was 2.7 times higher than for the general public. But the four new cases in the three years from 2008 to 2010 amounted to fully half the number seen in the thirteen years prior - at a time when the number of fatal non-Hogkin lymphoma cases among all South Korean women was dropping sharply, from 346 in 2008 to 199 in 2010. (No data were available of total diagnoses.)

“If the number of non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases rose in the semiconductor industry at a time when deaths for the general public were dropping between 2008 and 2010, then that’s extremely unusual,” said Kim In-ah, an occupational health specialist at the Yonsei University Graduate School of Public Health.

Experts said solving the semiconductor occupational health problem requires not only positive results from the current Samsung talks to apologize and compensate for cases and pledge preventive measures, but also a rigorous investigation of Hynix and a vigorous response.

“The Samsung cases got attention because Samsung was involved,” said Lim Sang-hyeok, an industrial medicine specialist and director of the Wonjin Institute for Occupational and Environmental Health. “Now we need a systemic approach to investigating the health conditions at the semiconductor line at SK Hynix in the interest of corporate social responsibility and human rights-oriented management.”

Kim Myung-hee MD, a preventive medicine specialist and fellow of the People’s Health Institute, said the Hankyoreh’s reporting on the issue “shows that it’s about more than just comparing what the big corporations are doing.”

“It shows that no company should be concealing things when it comes to the health rights of semiconductor workers, who use a lot of harmful chemicals,” Kim explained. “It’s because South Korea is a world leader in the semiconductor industry.”

Hynix claims its rate of fatal lymphatic and hematopoietic disease is “similar to that of the general public.”

“It’s not a situation where Samsung also can recognize a causal relationship between leukemia [and working environment],” the company added.

Hynix also said it was stepping up its safety and public health management system and commissioning a university research study.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]