SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
El Reg reports
A leaked presentation to Samsung executives has provided further insight into the company's damaged internal culture.
The PowerPoint document focuses on strategies to prevent the creation of labor unions at the South Korean company and takes a very aggressive stance, treating employees as enemies, and suggesting "countermeasures", as well as ways to "dominate employees".
It also talks about "punishing" union leaders, isolating "troublesome" employees, and "inducing internal conflicts" as a way of intimidating employees and preventing the creation of unions. The presentation is also dismissive of labor laws and government ministers that have proposed changes to protect employees.
The presentation [PPT] [PDF] is dated 2012, but appears to have been used repeatedly by Samsung executives up until two years ago. It was unearthed by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which drew a direct line between the approach demonstrated in the presentation and the recent aborted launch of the Galaxy Note 7 due to exploding batteries.
"Inhumane conditions are rife" at the company, the ITUC reports, noting that Samsung employees are overworked, under-paid, and forced to suffer appalling conditions, including "standing for 11 to 12 hours, verbal and physical abuse, severe age and gender discrimination, and lack of worker safety".
It quotes one worker who claimed that during an intense three-month period in the run-up to the release of a Galaxy tablet she slept only two or three hours a night and had to give up breastfeeding her three-month-old baby as a result.
One [slide] lists examples of employee deaths that have been attributed to overwork. One employee, Kim, killed himself and the presentation notes that he had worked 100 hours of overtime each month for nine months. A widow of a manager is quoted as saying he "died from overwork".
Ed Note: Title changed to more accurately reflect content. 0700UTC
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:48AM
Therefore, the GN7 started exploding because they stopped abusing their employees.
Not quite. The culture never changed -- it's just that their R&D group found a way (fairly impressively) to refine and channel the employees' frustration into their battery technology.
It worked well until the overwhelming depravity strained the batteries' structure until their containment fractured. At that point the batteries became despondent and pretty much just started committing suicide In the process, trying to take anyone in the vicinity with them using their (primarily combustible) available resources.