In an abrupt about-face, Samsung Electronics Co. today issued a public apology
to workers who contracted rare cancers linked to chemicals at its semiconductor
plants, or to the surviving family members it sometimes battled in South
Korea’s courts during a struggle that has stretched for seven years. The
company also said it is committed to compensating workers and their
families. We highlighted this struggle, and Samsung’s treatment of the workers’
families, in a feature I wrote for the magazine’s April 14 issue, “Samsung’s War at Home.”
Kwon Oh Hyun, vice chairman of Samsung, which is the world’s top producer of
memory chips and smartphones, specifically apologized to the families for the
way the controversy has dragged on. “We feel regret that a solution for this
delicate matter has not been found in a timely manner, and we would like to use
this opportunity to express our sincerest apology to the affected people,” Kwon
said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. The news agency said he
was shown on South Korean television reading the statement to reporters
this morning.
The company’s statement fell shy of accepting a connection between some of the
diseases, including leukemia, and carcinogens used in its plants, a link
Samsung has always denied. However, in a handful of cases the South Korean
courts and the government’s workers-compensation board have formally
connected cancers or pre-cancerous blood conditions to semiconductor work for
Samsung, especially at its oldest and once-biggest production facility. The
workers we highlighted stood on the lines of that plant.
Jungah Lee, the Seoul-based Samsung beat reporter for Bloomberg News,
quoted Kwon as also saying, “We will make appropriate compensation to those who were
affected and their families.” The details of how that compensation will work
remain to be seen, and I imagine there’s probably some skepticism among some of
the family members I spent time with in Korea earlier this year. They have
heard a similar pledge from the company at least once before.
But today’s statement is definitely different. The apology alone is a big
step forward. And it was quite extraordinary for me personally to see a senior
executive from Samsung–a company that prides itself on always striving for
perfection–talk this way about the controversy, given my study of Samsung’s
conduct throughout the struggle, and my own experiences with the company’s
executives just last month.
Before publication of our story, Samsung had a senior executive and two other
executives fly to London to visit me at our offices here. I was candid with
them about everything in the piece–details of which I questioned them about
in writing and in person. What they said to me here in London was off-the-
record, but it’s both fair and accurate to say that I felt there was a
disconnect between the well-established record of the company’s treatment of
the families in these cases and its public and private statements about always putting employees first.
That’s what will make Kwon’s apology today resonate across South Korea, where
Samsung’s revenues equal roughly one-quarter of the nation’s GDP. It is really
the first inkling of remorse from the nation’s most powerful corporation.
The timing also seems right in another respect: In the wake of the horrible
ferry disaster near Jindo, The New York Times and others declared South Koreans
were worrying about the nation’s tendency to “overlook safety precautions in its
quest for economic success.” We raised the same important questions in our piece, noting before the ferry deaths that they are now part of the mainstream cultural conversation thanks to two films in cinemas this year about the struggles of the Samsung families. Today, Samsung joined the conversation.
