Samsung accused of child labor abuses

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It seems mobile gadget design isn’t the only area where Samsung is uncomfortably reminiscent of Apple. Now the company stands accused of having its devices made in factories that abuse both adult and child laborers.

The claims come from China Labor Watch, a non-profit group based in the US that reports on alleged labor violations inChina– a particularly relevant topic now that so many American products come from the country, particularly in the tech world.


The group has previously been involved in highlighting alleged abuses at Apple’s Chinese suppliers, most notably Foxconn. Apple itself runs regular audits of suppliers in the country to crack down on abuses.

The new China Labor Watch report looks at eight factories used to produce Samsung products, a mix of third-party suppliers and Samsung’s own directly operated facilities.

The worst allegations involve a supplier, Tianjin, which is said to make staff work 11 hour shifts standing with no shoes and with no protection against fumes. The staff are also made to work as many as 150 hours of overtime a month, far more than China’s legal limit of 36 hours. It’s said the base pay was so low that workers had no practical choice about working the overtime.

After previous allegations of children working illegally, Samsung carried out an investigation of one supplier and said it found no evidence. Now China Labor Watch says that under 16s were getting jobs with forged identity cards and management did nothing to prevent it.

The biggest problem for Samsung is that although the worst specific allegations involve two suppliers, the report claims that the problems it highlights are “rampant throughout the entire Samsung manufacturing and supply network inChina.” While it doesn’t make much different to the realities of life for staff, US firms can at least claim plausible deniability with allegations about suppliers; when the claims turn to the company’s own factories things get trickier.

Samsung responded to the report by saying that it frequently reviews working hour practices and will do so again immediately. It noted that overtime is sometimes necessary when new products are launched, but says it has “zero tolerance” for the use of underage labor.

Posted in: China