Report: more evidence Samsung supplier using child labor in China

American nonprofit group China Labor Watch announced yesterday that it has collected additional evidence that child and student workers were employed “under exploitative working conditions” at the factory of Samsung supplier HEG Technology. That evidence includes interviews with children below China’s legal working age who say they worked ten-hour days with a single day of rest each week for the Samsung supplier.

According to the report, the underage workers were students at the Chengdu Urban Construction Vocational School. Excerpts from the interviews published by China Labor Watch suggest that both the school and HEG were aware that some of the workers were underage:

Gao [student worker]: What I know is, not a lot of the kids from our school who went to the [HEG] factory were under 16, but there were some. Around the end of their time at HEG, they were apparently discovered and forced to leave. So basically the factory made them come back to the school right before they were going to be inspected so that the kids wouldn’t be discovered.

Investigator: HEG won’t admit to it, but there were in fact students under the age of 16 working there for 1-2 months, correct?

Gao: One of those kids under 16 that you mentioned is with me now. There’s also one who has gone home already because today is Friday.

Investigator: Could you tell me their name?

Gao: The one next to me is named [name of child worker redacted], the other one is named [name of child worker redacted]. But when we went to the factory, the school had a lot of the under-aged kids use other students ID cards. They didn’t use their own names.

In the interviews, another student also tells China Labor Watch that students from other schools were also employed at HEG, although that information is unconfirmed.

Unfortunately, Chinese vocational schools making arrangements like this with factories is not uncommon. In this case as in many others, it seems students were required to work at the factory, ostensibly as part of their education. Their wages were paid directly to the school, which subtracted its own expenses (like tuition) before handing over the remaining money to students. Some students say they still haven’t been paid for their work.

See: Report: Foxconn using forced student labor to build Sony’s PS4

These allegations follow months of back-and-forth between China Labor Watch, Samsung, and HEG. China Labor Watch first published allegations of child labor at HEG in July in collaboration with the New York Times. Initially, Samsung and HEG denied the allegations, saying that in their own investigations over several years they had not found a single underage worker, and HEG filed a lawsuit against China Labor Watch for defamation in September. Since then, Samsung has conducted further investigation and admitted that some student workers were employed at HEG, but it apparently continues to deny that underage workers are involved in producing its products.

In the wake of this new evidence, Samsung told China Labor Watch it would carry out a follow-up investigation. Tech in Asia also contacted Samsung for comment on this story, and will update the post if we hear back.