Semiconductor History | 강남역 8번 출구 — One Thousand and Twenty-Three Days Outside Samsung's Seocho Building

The camp outside Exit 8 was two sheets of plastic and a sleeping bag. It stood on the pavement of 강남대로, in front of Samsung Electronics' Seocho building, from 7 October 2015 until 25 July 2018 — one thousand and twenty-three days. The people in it were 반올림, the group that grew out of a single death. 황유미 joined Samsung Electronics' semiconductor division in October 2003, straight out of high school, and worked from January 2004 to June 2005 on diffusion and wet etch at Giheung Line 3. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia and died on 6 March 2007, in her father's taxi, on the way to hospital. 황상기 turned down the company's settlement and asked for an investigation instead. Labour and civic organisations formed a committee outside the Giheung plant on 20 November 2007, and that committee became 반올림. On 23 June 2011 the Seoul Administrative Court recognised her death and one other as occupational, overturning the state insurer's refusal to pay. The sit-in came later, after a mediation committee's 2015 recommendation that Samsung answered by setting up a compensation scheme of its own. 반올림 wanted a scheme that excluded nobody, and moved onto the pavement to say so. Three summers and three winters followed. A reporter who spent a night there recorded a low of minus 10.8 degrees. On 24 July 2018 both sides signed an undertaking to accept whatever the arbitrators decided, and the camp came down the next day. The arbitrators delivered their award in early November. On 23 November 2018, at the Korea Press Center in Jung-gu, Samsung's 김기남 apologised and said the company had failed to manage health risks properly on its semiconductor and display lines. The scheme covers people who worked at those plants from 1984 onwards: sixteen cancers, other rare illnesses, miscarriages, and congenital conditions in workers' children, with payments of up to 150 million won a case. Samsung did not concede that its workplaces had caused the illnesses. The counts differ depending on who is counting and when. 반올림 listed 79 reported deaths on its own register in March 2017, and campaigners told reporters in November 2018 of roughly 240 people ill and about 80 dead. The photograph shows the towers the camp faced across 강남대로. The pavement is pavement again, with nothing on it to say what stood there. Photo: Oskar Alexanderson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.