Brazil Sues Samsung Over Worker Conditions 110
First time accepted submitter konohitowa writes "The Financial Times is reporting that the Brazilian government has filed a lawsuit against Samsung for working conditions that put workers' health at risk (both through repetitive motion injuries as well as excessive consecutive work days). Samsung has 'promised to conduct a thorough review and fully co-operate with the Brazilian authorities once it receives details of the complaint.'"
Re:Get this crap out of here. (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would /. allow a submission that uses a source that requires registration or a premium account to view?
Possibly because Slashdot is now owned by a company that requires registration and a premium account for many of its websites [diceholdingsinc.com]. Naturally, they aren't going to see much of a problem with that.
Re:I happen to know how Samsung builds products (Score:5, Interesting)
I happen to know how Samsung builds products. And RSI is actually not an issue. This is a payoff fishing expedition from Brazil needing currency, now that they've closed down external bank transfers in US dollars, and shut down a large sector of their economy. Rather than admit their mistake and undo it, they are now looking to get their money a different way.
Strange, but Apple (contractors Pegatron and Honhai) have faced the same charges in other countries.
Could it be that Samsung manufactures phones so dramatically differently that all Brazil can do shake Samsung down for a couple hundred thousand?
I'm under NDA on the exact process; they consider it proprietary. It's very weird, but in the limit, it makes a lot of sense, even if it adds some overhead that a traditional RSI-prone process would not have.
It's either a fishing expedition on the payola, as I said earlier, or it's a fishing expedition on the assembly process. I think they could have just hired an independent auditor to ask about it, sign the same NDA, the auditor would have just said "Oh." and told them to drop the RSI claim.
They may still have claims on the ergonomic furniture and the breaks, assuming workers in other manufacturing plants in Brazil get more breaks and, say, Herman Miller or other highly ergonomic chairs. It looks like they've already agreed to a modification of the work hours, specifically regarding mandatory overtime.
Here's an article on the lawsuit not behind a pay-wall, since the original link in the summary is generally unreadable:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579012712866922406.html [wsj.com]
Note that they actually own up to the overtime policy and agree to change it.
PS: If you do a more than trivial look at the earlier China Labor Watch complaint, you'll see the same overtime issue, but that the basic labor rights issues were (eventually) admitted to be limited to the two third party suppliers, rather than the Samsung plants themselves.
Re:mexico drug wars is bad for makeing phones (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blame the foreigners (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it is much harder for a domestic company (specially if it is not very large) to get away with this kind of behavior.
Brazil has very strict work laws, up to the point that even nannies and house cleaners are jobs under strict regulation. This case with Samsung is indeed very worrying, however it is not as common in companies as most people would expect in Brazil. We have hundreds of unions who have very resonant voices in politics.
Work conditions abuses in Brazil come mostly in two flavors:
i) Rural work in farms, specially up North. It is not uncommon to have people working under slavery regime in some farms, and some of the scandals involve even politicians who are also big farmers. The workers are usually very poor people who are deluded into getting a job in a farm and getting rich. Their travel costs are covered by the farmer, and so is living cost and food, and they stay in an eternal debt without ever leaving. They end up working 18 hours shifts for food, with no sanitary conditions, etc. This is taken seriously in Brazil, but more often than not the responsible for this are rich people, so they get away with fines and never see the inside of a jail cell.
ii) Manual labor done by foreigners, in particular by South Americans. In Sao Paulo city there are 200,000 Bolivians, 80% of them are illegal, and most of them work with sewing. They work under very poor conditions and earn very little. Since most of them are illegal, and most of them are in debt with people who helped them to get here, they are afraid to seek the police.
But in companies this is not the case. Even to me this news about Samsung came as a shock.