Bloomberg.com. « American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem. Then They Outsourced It ». 15 juin 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it.
(extracts from the article)
American chipmakers had a toxic problem. Then they outsourced it.
Twenty-five years ago, U.S. tech companies pledged to stop using chemicals that caused miscarriages and birth defects. They failed to ensure that their Asian suppliers did the same.
Scientists from the University of California at Davis designed one of the biggest worker-health studies in history, involving 14 SIA companies, 42 plants, and 50,000 employees.
SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) pointed to a family of toxic chemicals widely used in chipmaking as the likely cause and declared that its companies would accelerate efforts to phase them out. IBM (International Business Machines Corp) went further: It pledged to rid its global chip production of them by 1995.
As semiconductor production shifted to less expensive countries, the industry’s promised fixes do not appear to have made the same journey, at least not in full.
Confidential data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that thousands of women and their unborn children continued to face potential exposure to the same toxins until at least 2015. Some are probably still being exposed today. Separate evidence shows the same reproductive-health effects also persisted across the decades.
The risks are exacerbated by secrecy—the industry may be using toxins that still haven’t been disclosed.
After the outcry in the U.S. in the 1990s, chemical companies said they’d changed the formulations for the photoresists and other products they supplied to chipmakers, including those in Asia. But testing data obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that changes weren’t made quickly or, in some cases, completely.
In 2009, South Korean scientists tested a total of 10 random samples taken from drums of photoresists at a Samsung plant and an SK Hynix plant. Because concern then focused on leukemia, the photoresists were tested only for toxins related to that disease. Of the two samples that contained the highest concentrations, one came from SK Hynix, the other from Samsung.
A movement in South Korea to recognize the health consequences of toxic exposure for semiconductor workers has slowly amassed political, social, and cultural gravity over the course of a decade. For much of that time, Samsung waged an often bitter and public battle with the families of dead or sick workers. The company paid some of the nation’s top lawyers to fight workers’ compensation claims—a remarkable step, given that payments were from a government insurance pool, not the company. Executives were secretly recorded offering or paying families money in exchange for withdrawing their claims and keeping quiet.
By 2014, following growing international attention and the domestic release of Another Promise, a dramatic film about the fight, the tide had turned. The government stopped rejecting compensation claims outright, and courts backed workers in a handful of cases. Finally, Samsung apologized publicly for the way it treated the families.
Although both Samsung and SK Hynix continue to deny there’s any causal link, both companies began by early last year to privately compensate current and former workers or their families for illnesses and deaths.
Bloomberg.com. « American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem. Then They Outsourced It ». 15 juin 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it.
(extracts from the article)
American chipmakers had a toxic problem. Then they outsourced it.
Twenty-five years ago, U.S. tech companies pledged to stop using chemicals that caused miscarriages and birth defects. They failed to ensure that their Asian suppliers did the same.
Scientists from the University of California at Davis designed one of the biggest worker-health studies in history, involving 14 SIA companies, 42 plants, and 50,000 employees.
SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) pointed to a family of toxic chemicals widely used in chipmaking as the likely cause and declared that its companies would accelerate efforts to phase them out. IBM (International Business Machines Corp) went further: It pledged to rid its global chip production of them by 1995.
As semiconductor production shifted to less expensive countries, the industry’s promised fixes do not appear to have made the same journey, at least not in full.
Confidential data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that thousands of women and their unborn children continued to face potential exposure to the same toxins until at least 2015. Some are probably still being exposed today. Separate evidence shows the same reproductive-health effects also persisted across the decades.
The risks are exacerbated by secrecy—the industry may be using toxins that still haven’t been disclosed.
After the outcry in the U.S. in the 1990s, chemical companies said they’d changed the formulations for the photoresists and other products they supplied to chipmakers, including those in Asia. But testing data obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that changes weren’t made quickly or, in some cases, completely.
In 2009, South Korean scientists tested a total of 10 random samples taken from drums of photoresists at a Samsung plant and an SK Hynix plant. Because concern then focused on leukemia, the photoresists were tested only for toxins related to that disease. Of the two samples that contained the highest concentrations, one came from SK Hynix, the other from Samsung.
A movement in South Korea to recognize the health consequences of toxic exposure for semiconductor workers has slowly amassed political, social, and cultural gravity over the course of a decade. For much of that time, Samsung waged an often bitter and public battle with the families of dead or sick workers. The company paid some of the nation’s top lawyers to fight workers’ compensation claims—a remarkable step, given that payments were from a government insurance pool, not the company. Executives were secretly recorded offering or paying families money in exchange for withdrawing their claims and keeping quiet.
By 2014, following growing international attention and the domestic release of Another Promise, a dramatic film about the fight, the tide had turned. The government stopped rejecting compensation claims outright, and courts backed workers in a handful of cases. Finally, Samsung apologized publicly for the way it treated the families.
Although both Samsung and SK Hynix continue to deny there’s any causal link, both companies began by early last year to privately compensate current and former workers or their families for illnesses and deaths.