반도체 노동자의 건강과 인권지킴이 반올림

Hyun-Ju Kim is a physician specializing in occupational and environmental medicine and a professor at Ewha Womans University College of Medicine. She previously served as a professor at Dankook University and as head of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Dankook University Hospital, as well as Deputy Director of the Seoul Workers’ Health Center and an advisor to the Minister of Employment and Labor. Her work focuses on workers’ health, occupational disease prevention, and the relationship between working conditions and health. She currently serves on the Seoul Disease Adjudication Committee of the Korea Workers’ Compensation & Welfare Service and as a co-chair of the Network of Experts on Serious Disasters..

Myoung-Hee Kim is a preventive medicine physician and researcher focusing on health inequalities and the social determinants of health. She has been involved with Labor Health and Safety Solidarity (노동건강연대), working on research and advocacy related to workers’ health and health inequalities. She approaches workers’ health as a social and structural issue rather than simply an individual health problem. Myoung-Hee Kim is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Gyeongsang National University. She continues her research and public health advocacy through organizations including Labor Health and Safety Solidarity.

JO Seunggyu was born in South Korea and is a certified labor attorney who works with SHARPS. After graduating in sociology, he chose SHARPS as his first workplace, convinced that the right to safety deserved far greater public attention. He now runs his own labor law practice here in this city Suwon(Welcome to my hometown) while continuing his work with SHARPS. Since 2020, he has been working on the issue of health damage to the children of workers exposed to occupational hazards. There was little progress on this issue in Korea, and it would not have been possible if it was just a problem in Korea. In this presentation, he introduces how Korean victims have built their movement on the history of victims in Other countries.

Rochelle Porras is a labour rights defender and development worker from the Philippines. She has more than 15 years of experience in non-profit organisations and has supported electronics workers and trade unions. She has developed education programmes on occupational health and safety in the electronics sector, as well as gender and labour issues for women workers. As the GoodElectronics Regional Coordinator for Asia, she works on labour rights and supply chain issues in the electronics industry. She also has a background in media and has documented the experiences of workers and labour rights defenders through writing and multimedia work.

Dr. Pillkyu Hwang is Executive Director of the Transnational Human Rights Institute at Gonggam Human Rights Law Foundation and a former adjunct professor in charge of the international human rights law clinic at Seoul National University Law School and Ewha Law School. The main areas of his work include international human rights, migrants and refugees, business and human rights, disaster and human rights, and access to justice in general both in Korea and around the world. He graduated from Seoul National University with an LL.B. and has earned his PhD in public international law at the same university. He was a visiting academic at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society of Oxford University, and a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School. He was a member of the Reform Committee within the National Human Rights Commission in 2017 and a President-nominated commissioner of the Special Commission on Social Disasters in Korea from 2018 to 2022. He was the chair of the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN) (2010-2012) and the Asian Consortium for Human Rights Based Access to Justice (Hrba2j-Asia) (2011-2017). He is now a member of the Presidential Commission on Life and Safety, a vice-chair of the LAWASIA Human Rights Committee and a member of a number of human rights-related committees within the Korean Bar Association, and has served as an advisory board member of the Fortify Rights since 2015 and an editorial team member of the Business and Human Rights Journal since 2019.

I worked in environment, health and safety at Samsung Electronics for more than 40 years. During a special environmental health and safety inspection of Samsung Electronics' factories in Vietnam, I found serious problems, including the unauthorized release of toxic gases and inadequate wastewater treatment facilities. I reported these findings along with recommended corrective measures, but no improvements were made. When I kept raising these issues internally, I was instead reassigned to the Vietnam factory in what amounted to a demotion. I continued working to improve environmental health and safety at the Bac Ninh and Ho Chi Minh City factories in Vietnam and at their subcontractors until I retired. After retiring, I provided internal documents to Newstapa and SHARPS as a whistleblower, in order to expose the truth behind the falsehoods Samsung presented to the public through its Sustainability Reports and other channels, and to press for change.

Hyunjun Yang is a Coordinator at KTNC Watch. As a full-time public interest lawyer, his work focuses on business and human rights and labour rights. He serves as the Head of the Legal Team for the Joint Action for the Right to Rest When Sick, a coalition campaigning for the institutionalisation of paid sick leave and sickness benefits in South Korea, and provides free labour law counselling to workers through Gapjil119. He has litigated cases concerning the impacts of the renewable energy transition on local farmers and the employment status of platform delivery riders. At KTNC Watch, he has monitored and addressed human rights abuses committed by Korean corporations operating overseas and by companies within their global supply chains. He is currently leading advocacy efforts for the enactment of a mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD) law in South Korea.

She is a human rights activist at Dasan Human Rights Center. Founded in 1992, Dasan Human Rights Center has worked to defend human rights in Korea with the belief that there should be no compromise on human rights. The center was involved from the early process of building SHARPS, which brought the occupational disease issues of Samsung Semiconductor workers to public attention, and has worked to frame workers’ health and lives as human rights issues. Through this connection, she has also been involved in SHARPS activities.

Her work also covers labor and human rights, discrimination and hate, and disasters and human rights. More recently, she has been involved in efforts for an equality ordinance and local human rights policies in Gyeonggi Province, human rights education and campaigns, responses to human rights violations, and solidarity activities. She works alongside people whose rights and dignity are at risk and seeks to ensure that no one is left alone.

Kim Sun-kyung worked at Samsung Electronics’ Giheung plant for 18 years and is now raising her two children after leaving the company. After her husband passed away from a brain tumor, she learned about SHARPS while seeking to understand the connection between his work and illness. What began as an effort to address her husband’s occupational disease case led her to hear the stories of many others facing similar experiences and to see the broader issues involved. As a former semiconductor worker, mother, and bereaved family member, she now shares what she has experienced and learned and speaks out with others.

Jeong Hyang-suk worked at Samsung Electronics’ Giheung semiconductor plant for more than 20 years. After leaving the company, she developed a rare giant cell tumor of the temporal bone and underwent three surgeries. She is currently pursuing a workers’ compensation lawsuit as an affected worker. She now works with SHARPS, providing counseling to ill semiconductor workers and bereaved families and sharing their experiences from the field. She continues to work to protect the health and lives of ordinary workers behind the image of advanced semiconductor technology.

Director of the Climate Change and Just Transition Department, Environmental Rights Foundation. The core focus is on how to achieve a just transition toward net zero. Current research and advocacy areas include carbon pricing, accelerating a just transition to renewable energy, decarbonizing hard-to-abate industries such as steel and petrochemicals, and addressing the growing pressure on carbon emissions resulting from the rapidly increasing electricity demand of advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes.

Judith is the director of CHIPS Communities United, a US coalition of unions, environmental groups, and community-based organizations collaborating to make the semiconductor industry more sustainable, equitable, and accountable. The coalition’s focus is on chip production in the US, but with a global industry, we believe it is vital to partner with communities across the supply chain and around the world. Judith has been working in social justice advocacy for three decades. Previous positions include advocacy director at Good Jobs First, an activist think-tank that tracks corporate subsidies, and communications director at the California Labor Federation. Judith also founded and led a consulting firm providing strategy, research, and writing to community organizing groups and other progressive non-profit organizations. Judith holds degrees from Harvard College, Princeton University, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She lives in Berkeley, California. This is her first time visiting Korea.