A GLOBAL labour grouping exposed “medieval conditions” at South Korean transnational Samsung in a report published yesterday.

International Trade Union Confederation general secretary Sharan Burrow accused Samsung of a litany of abuses “from denying justice to the families of former employees who died from cancers caused by unsafe workplaces to dodging tax and engaging in price-fixing cartels.

“One thing is constant: Samsung’s corporate culture is ruthlessly geared towards maximising profit to the detriment of the everyday lives of its workers,” she said.

The “chaebol,” or family-owned conglomerate, produces a fifth of South Korea’s exports.

“So sprawling is Samsung’s modern-day empire that some South Koreans say it has become possible to live a Samsung-only life,” the report said.

“You can use a Samsung credit card to buy a Samsung TV for the living room of your Samsung-made apartment on which you’ll watch the Samsung-owned pro baseball team.”

According to China Labour Watch, workers in Samsung factories, some of them children, have to do 100 hours of forced overtime a month, some unpaid, and are forced to stand for 11 to 12 hours.

At a 2012 court hearing, Samsung Electronics chief designer Wang Jee Yuen said she had slept for just two or three hours a night for three months while designing app icons for the Galaxy S smartphone, which forced her to stop breastfeeding her baby.

The report detailed how Samsung Electronics used subsidiaries to hire casual workers.

Ninety-eight of its 107 after-market repair centres are run by contractors, employing around 6,000 staff in total on a piecework basis, an arrangement that exempts the corporation from heath and safety liability.

It said repair personnel were required to spend fewer than 40 minutes on each job, depriving them of the time needed to put up protective gear or call in help when needed.

Supervisors urge them to work faster and faster via texting, with often fatal results. Between 2014 and 2016 at least four repair staff died on the job or committed suicide as a result of the pace of their work and the company’s attempts to crush a unionisation drive.

A 115-page internal company document obtained in October 2013 revealed Samsung’s plan to keep its companies and suppliers union-free.

It discusses how to spot workers most likely to try to organise and advises on how to monitor, isolate and eventually thwart workers who exercise their right to form a union.

“For contractors in Samsung’s supply chain whose workers join a union, there is a contract guillotine,” Ms Burrow said.

“From the top of its supply chain down, Samsung prohibits the formation of unions by threatening to cancel contracts wherever workers organise.”