hankyoreh

By Kim Min-kyung, staff reporter

Over this Chuseok holiday, Hwang Sang-ki, 59, was behind the wheel of his taxi. He didn’t go to see his daughter Yu-mi, who died of leukemia on Mar. 6, 2007, at the age of 23, while working at a Samsung Electronics semiconductor plant.

Hwang scattered his daughter’s ashes on a low hill in Sokcho, Gangwon Province, that looks out on Ulsanbawi, a rock formation at Seorak Mountain, and the East Sea, but he seldom goes there. “I would like to see her, but when I visit I keep crying,” Hwang said.

As if to show its respect for Hwang’s feelings, the Korea Workers’ Compensation and Welfare Service announced on Sep. 10 that it would not appeal the decision of the Seoul High Court on Aug. 21 that recognized Hwang Yu-mi and Lee Suk-young’s illnesses as industrial accidents. Overjoyed with the news, Yu-mi appeared to her mother while she was sleeping.

Yu-mi got a job at Samsung Electronics’ plant in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province in Oct. 2003, while she was still in her third year of high school. Her job at the plant was applying heat to semiconductor plates and using gas or chemical solution to smooth their surface. After two years of work, she came down with leukemia and died two years after that.

Hwang has fought with great strength as a father. Nine years after Yu-mi was diagnosed with leukemia, and seven years after she passed away, he finally had his innocent daughter’s condition ruled an industrial accident.

“I would find myself tearing up at the thought of her getting her head shaved when she was battling her illness,” he said in a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh. “It was nice, in a way - it brought back a lot of old feelings.”

“I kept my promise to Yu-mi that I would find out what caused her disease,” he added, the mixture of joy and grief in his voice hinting at the complex emotions underneath.

The seven years it took him to keep that promise, however, were deeply painful.

“I was talking to an Ajou University Hospital doctor when I decided to file an industrial accident claim, and I was told, ‘Don’t even think of trying to link it to Samsung,‘” he recalled. “When Yu-mi wrote her resignation letter at Samsung, they told her they’d pay her 50 million won (US$48,400) in hospital expenses to date, and then an employee came to the hospital a month later with 5 million won (US$4,840) and said, ‘This should be enough.’ I think about that a lot.”

He didn’t back down. Instead, he went around visiting the news media and civic groups, insisting that Samsung be held accountable. In Nov. 2007, he and labor attorney Lee Jong-ran launched Banollim, a watchdog group for semiconductor worker health and human rights. It was the beginning of a long battle that had him going back and forth constantly between Sokcho and Seoul. The group received reports of 289 victims of occupational diseases in semiconductors and electronics over that time.

But the barrier to recognition remains high. Of the 43 people who requested industrial accident rulings, only five received them. It was only in the cases of Yu-mi and fellow Samsung Semiconductors employee Lee Suk-young that a causal link was acknowledged between their duties and the leukemia they suffered from.

“When the court made its ruling in the first trial, I wasn’t sure if this was really happening,” Hwang said. “It was after the second trial that everything became clear. The ruling said the people working at Samsung had gotten sick and died because the company hasn’t controlled its chemicals well. That just convinced me more that we needed to get Samsung to provide true compensation and preventive measures.”

Hwang still has a long way to go. Talks with Samsung over a host of other workers like Yu-mi are currently bogged down. A rift has also emerged recently between Banollim, which is demanding compensation for all industrial accident claimants, and six families that are more interested in their own compensation at the moment. Everyone is worn down from disease and caregiving.

“If Samsung’s plan isn’t just to hand over a bit of money to make the problem go away, then it needs to be aboveboard the way a big corporation should be,” Hwang said. “They need to make a clear promise not to let this happen again, and they need to resolve the compensation issue through the talks.”

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