Samsung Agrees to Pay $85.8 million to Employees that Got Cancer on Their Watch

[dgstorm]

How would you feel about working for a company that had such lax safety measures at its facilities that you contracted something as bad as cancer? Sadly, that's what happened to more than 200 people who worked at Samsung factories over the last 10 years.

The South Korean activist group "Sharps" found more than 200 individual cases in which workers fell ill after working at one of Samsung's factories. The illnesses were wide-ranging and even included various incurable diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. In fact, over 70 of the stricken individuals have died.

Apparently the problems at the Samsung factory ranged from gas leaks, to radiation leaks and more. Samsung has agreed to address the issues and compensate the afflicted and their families. Here's a quote with a few more details,

Tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Monday it will create a 100 billion won ($85.8 million) fund to compensate cancer-stricken workers and their families, and for efforts to prevention such diseases at its chip and display factories.

Samsung said in a statement the fund will make payments to workers or families of those who became sick while working at its plants, including contractors. The fund would also pay for research, development of experts and other methods to improve worker safety.

I don't know about you folks, but less than $100 Million dollars spent on research into making factory improvements and to compensate victims seems paltry compared to dying from cancer!

Source: Reuters

 

[cr6]

Almost as bad as Foxconn! Ugh


S5 tap'n

 

[dezymond]

No amount of money could make up for that.

 

[Vepaot]

Huh? Lymphoma is totally curable. I have a family member battling it right now and their survival right rate is very high. The doctor even said...if you're going to get cancer, it's one of the better ones to get.

Anyway, the amount of money spent by Samsung to rectify the situation is a travesty. It's almost like they're laughing at their employees. According to Statista, Samsung has made 728 BILLION dollars (USD) between 2011 and 2014. Or to put it in perspective, they're spending about 0.001179% of that on worker's compensation AND safety measures to prevent accidents again.

Excuse my language, but screw them. These are people's lives we're talking about here.

 

[RyanPm40]

Huh? Lymphoma is totally curable. I have a family member battling it right now and their survival right rate is very high. The doctor even said...if you're going to get cancer, it's one of the better ones to get.

Anyway, the amount of money spent by Samsung to rectify the situation is a travesty. It's almost like they're laughing at their employees. According to Statista, Samsung has made 728 BILLION dollars (USD) between 2011 and 2014. Or to put it in perspective, they're spending about 0.001179% of that on worker's compensation AND safety measures to prevent accidents again.

Excuse my language, but screw them. These are people's lives we're talking about here.

Cancer is never cured, you can just go into remission.

 

[Narsil]

The problem with cancer is that it is next to impossible to determine what caused it. Smoke a pack a day for 40 years and you get lung cancer, maybe the cigarettes caused it. Drink a 5th of vodka every day for 30 years and develop liver cancer, maybe the alcohol caused it. George Burns drank and smoke heavily his entire adult life and lived to be a very spry 100 while people who've never smoked a cigarette or lived in a smoking home die from lung cancer in their 30's.

I work in the medical physics industry as a consultant and cancer is one tricky and rather unpredictable bastard. Radiation is a very poor carcinogen, despite what the movies and media tell you. Chemicals are far better at causing cancer but it's all statistics and you never actually know what caused it.

 

[FoxKat]

Cancer is never cured, you can just go into remission.

The even greater truth is that every human being has some cancer cells in their bodies, but their immune system is strong enough in most to keep the cancer cells from metastasizing. A recent study by a university explored autopsies of many thousand cadavers and discovered that in every example, no matter what the cause of death there were detectable levels of cancer in the body in one form or another. In most of those the cancer was not metastasized but was there none the less.

What the question is of course, is whether there is a significantly higher rate of actual metastasized cancer in those individuals at these plants than there are at similar plants, and also than control groups which are not exposed to similar environments. In this case, the evidence seems to point clearly to both dramatically increased risk of contracting "cancer" and also a dramatically increased level of system failures in the environment adding to the risk. Both are likely evidence enough to make the claim that the cancer was caused by the environment. This must be true otherwise there would have been no settlement.

And yes, $85MM for over 200 cases in 10 years, with over 70 resulting in death... That's a paltry sum of money for what is really impossible to put a value on, but certainly loss of life is in the millions itself IMHO. Given that calculation, $1MM for each of the surviving families leaves $15MM to divide among another 130+ surviving cancer sufferers... Disgusting is the word that comes to mind for a company that made $728BB over just the recent 3 years.