Semiconductor manufacturing is fundamental to a feature firm that has been made by Korean film director Tae-yun Kim.
This is because he chosen to tackle the story of Yu-mi Hwang, a worker at a Samsung semiconductor factory in Gi-Heung, south of Seoul, who died from acute myeloid leukemia aged 22 on March 6, 2007, just four years after starting work there. It also tells the story of her taxi-driver father Sang-gi Hwang who believed that chemical exposure at work caused her death and campaigned for several years to try and get Samsung to take responsibility.
Another Promise is set for release early in February.
The film premiered at Busan International Film Festival in October 2013 under the title Another Family, a slogan used by Samsung. Kim told the Korea Times that he decided to change the title of the film himself and did not come under pressure from Samsung. The movie has been crowd-source funded, according to a Wall Street Journal report that said 7,000 people provided more than a quarter of the billion-won (about $925,000) budget.
Yu-mi Hwang's death was originally assumed to be an unfortunate natural occurrence but her family did not accept this. Her father set about trying to show that it was Yu-mi Hwang's work at an unautomated station cleaning semiconductor wafers that contributed to her illness and death. Hwang senior discovered that another woman working on the same machine as Yu-mi Hwang had also died of leukemia and that a previous co-worker at the station had left Samsung after suffering a miscarriage.
Lobbying groups got behind Hwang's efforts in 2010 and launched the "Samsung Accountability Campaign" with the claim that they had discovered an unusual cluster of cancers amongst Samsung fab workers. Cluster arguments based on statistics aree often unsuccessful in court because they do not, in themselves, establish a causal relationship between a given death and the specific circumstances that person experienced.
A video in which Sang-gi Hwang spoke to camera about his daughter's death was posted as part of the campaign. In the video he explains that one colleague of Yu-mi's resigned after she had a miscarriage and was replaced by SookYoung Lee and that both Yu-mi Hwang and SookYoung Lee subsequently died of leukemia (see video here).
A court was eventually persuaded to examine the evidence for "unusual clusters" of illness at the Samsung factory. The court in Seoul, South Korea, ordered Samsung pay compensation in 2011, although the company continued to deny responsibility at that time.
Chemicals used in semiconductor and electronics factories have been blamed for worker ill health in the past. Legal suits were brought against IBM in 2003 and concerns were raised before that about cancer clusters at a National Semiconductor wafer fab in Greenock, Scotland. In a high-profile case in Silicon Valley in the 1980s a law firm in San Jose, California won an undisclosed settlement in a suit where it alleged that Fairchild Semiconductor had polluted soil and, potentially, groundwater. The pollution was said to have caused birth defects, cancer and miscarriages among nearby residents.
Samsung was reported to have commissioned an independent study of health and safety at its semiconductor factories in 2010. However, in the case of the factory where Yu-mi Hwang and SookYoung Lee worked it would have been likely that equipment would have been upgraded and layouts changed by that time.
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