"Samsung knowingly exposed workers to highly toxic chemicals, whistleblower claims", 12 April 2023

In late 2012, Kang, an environmental safety officer working for Samsung, visited the company’s factory in Bac Ninh, Vietnam. The factory’s 16,000 workers, specializing in assembling high-tech electronics, churned out a hundred million of the company’s smartphones every year. 

Bac Ninh is located in the industrial north of the country, among miles of lush green farmland. Here, suppliers for tech giants — from Apple to Microsoft, Samsung to Google — employ thousands of locals to work on production lines. The processes can involve powerful chemicals, used to paint, clean, and cool components in contained environments.

Kang looked around. Many workers were covering their noses as they walked the floor, he told Rest of World. Some wore masks, but they looked too flimsy to be graded to filter harmful chemicals. The airless, foul-smelling production floor made him uneasy. “This factory is breaking the law, and must be shut down,” he recalled thinking. 

It wasn’t the only indication of what Kang believed to be lax management, he said in an interview with Rest of World. The source of the fumes, he said, came from the air filtration system. Bags of activated carbon, intended to absorb harmful substances, sat unreplaced for six months in various parts of the system. Workers had tried to release the fumes by creating gaps in the factory wall, so the unfiltered air leaked outside, Kang said.

As he investigated further, Kang realized the facility didn’t have a production wastewater treatment tank, critical for isolating chemically contaminated water used to clean equipment and paint stains. Instead, the factory’s wastewater was discharged directly through rainwater pipes to the river nearby, he claimed. Troubled, he returned to South Korea and wrote a report to his superiors.

Still, despite his years of warnings, conditions failed to change. Complaints against Samsung’s labor conditions in Vietnam began to appear. In 2016, a 22-year-old female worker suddenly collapsed at Samsung’s Thai Nguyen factory, sparking whispers of overwork and occupational poisoning among the worker community. A 2017 survey of 45 Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen workers indicated they suffered from frequent fainting, eyesight damage, nosebleeds, even miscarriage. In both events, Samsung did not acknowledge a connection to the workplace. The company threatened legal action against the civil society groups that authored the study, sparking “serious concern” from several members of the United Nations’ Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council.

Late last year, Kang finally blew the whistle to South Korean investigative news outlet Newstapa, which published his story in March. In it, he alleged that Samsung’s managers, in both Vietnam and South Korea, regularly ignored environmental and safety regulations, and that in all 14 years of Bac Ninh’s operation, he was not aware of those lapses ever being investigated by the Vietnamese government. Samsung has refuted the news report, saying the company is “strictly complying” with environmental safety laws in the countries where it operates. The company did not respond to Rest of World’s request for comment.