[FanIn80]

(New York) Today, China Labor Watch released an investigative report on Samsung’s supplier HEG Electronics (Huizhou) Co., Ltd. HEG is an important partner of South Korea’s Samsung, processing such products as mobile phones, DVDs, stereo equipment and MP3s for Samsung. China Labor Watch carried out three investigations during the months of June and July 2012, uncovering issues of child labor and student labor exploitation as well as several other problems. A serious light needs to be shined on these issues.

Our research indicates that student workers amount to 80% of the factory workforce. Based on follow-up investigations, our investigators suspected that there were a large number of child workers in other departments of the factory, estimating that there may have been 50 to 100 children working in the factory. (In our interviews, the youngest worker was 14 years old.) These children were working under same harsh conditions as adult workers, but were paid only 70% of the wages when compared with the formal employees. Moreover, these child workers were often required to carry-out dangerous tasks that resulted in injury.

The following are the violations we discovered in this investigation:

• The factory hires a large number of student and child workers. These children were working under same harsh conditions as adult workers, but were paid only 70% of the wages when compared with the formal employees. The rights of these children and students are not properly protected.
• There is discrimination based on sex, age, and individuality during the hiring process.
• Excessive working time. The workers toil 11 hours per day (including 3-5 hours of forced overtime), 6 days per week, 26-28 days per month. Their attendance system is also defective and unfair, negatively influencing the physical and mental health of the student and child workers.
• Legal problems exist in issues regarding the labor contract, remuneration system, and reward and punishment system of the company. There are extremely strict punishments, and the workers are frequently fined.
• Night shift workers are only given time to eat one meal during the 11-hour work shift. The normal meal break is 30-40 minutes long.
• The workers always work under dangerous conditions, and work injuries are common.

http://chinalaborwatch.wordpress.com...sung-supplier/

The management are abusive during work, sometimes hitting workers on the factory floor. Any carelessness, such as slow movements, misoperation, or late completion of team leaders’ orders could provoke the shouting of team leaders at any time. Every day, employees in the workshops were punished by standing (be made to stand) all day long, writing self-criticism, or getting fined. However, based on interviews with the management, their attitude towards the above issues was that they had gone through the same process before they reached their current position, and when mistakes are made, one naturally must accept punishment.

On the morning of June 29th, 2012, a worker in Line 8 of Production Three Packing, accidentally drew a line on a box, failing to pass the quality test in the OQC spot check. This worker was punished by standing for an entire day and was fired and fined 300 RMB ($47.6) in the afternoon.

http://chinalaborwatch.files.wordpre...msung8-271.pdf