Labor violations at Kiryung Electronics Factory.

The Hankyoreh ran this photo today outside the offices of Sirius, whose satellite radios are built by Kiryung Electronics Factory in Seoul. The above demonstration took place in New York on Tuesday because of "Abusive Sweatshop Conditions at the Kiryung Electronics Factory in South Korea." You can find a long summary of grievances from the National Labor Committee; an excerpt:

* Over 250 production line workers at the Kiryung Electronics factory have no rights and are held under conditions of constant fear.
Married women are limited to just three-month contracts so they can be fired if they become pregnant.

* Workers can be fired for using the bathroom, requesting to leave “early” when the regular shift ends at 5:00 p.m., for arriving a few minutes late, for asking for a sick day, or being unable to work on a weekend or national holidays.

* Forced to work 13 to 14-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, sometimes going for up to three months without a single day off. There are also grueling all-night 24-hour shifts two or three times a month. After toiling all night, workers must still report for their next shift at 8:00 a.m. the following morning, leaving them working a 38-hour shift. Workers report toiling 100 to 120 hours of overtime a month.

* Workers making Sirius Satelite radios earn just $145 a week, despite the fact that the cost of living in Seoul is just as high, if not higher, than in New York City.

* Paid below-subsistence wages, workers and their families must subsist on rice and kimchee (pickled cabbage).

* The work pace is so grueling that workers cannot even raise their heads, talk or use the bathroom. The women must learn to “hold their bladder,” but report that they sometimes “leak.”

* In the face of discrimination against pregnant women, the lack of rights, grueling hours and below-subsistence pay, the workers organized a union in July 2005. Management immediately threatened to fire the women, who then occupied the plant staging a sit-down strike. The sit-down lasted 55 days before the workers were driven from the factory by riot police.

* Kiryung management informed the workers that at the insistence of Sirius Satellite Radio, production of the radios would be relocated to a low wage factory in China.

* Hired goons also attacked the strikers, stomping, kicking and beating the women.

* For 1,160 days, the women have continued their strike, setting up a tent city in front of the main gate of the factory. Over 1,000 supporters joined a one-day hunger strike to support the workers. The head of the local union at the Kiryung factory went on a hunger strike for 94 days before being hospitalized in mid-September 2008.

* The struggle for justice continues, as a delegation of striking workers travels to the U.S. on October 15 to confront management at Sirius Satellite Radio and to seek the support of the American people in their just struggle.

The Hankyoreh is to journalistic integrity what a crackhead is to responsiblity, but it nevertheless has painted a pretty damning picture of the factory and its union.