Seoul: The leader of Samsung Electronics Co.'s largest labor union and a senior union official are under investigation on suspicion of stealing the personal information of about 100,000 company employees to create a "union blacklist," information obtained by Yonhap News Agency showed Friday.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the Hwaseong Dongtan Police Station has referred Choi Seung-ho, head of the Samsung Electronics labor union, and the unidentified senior union official to the prosecution without detention. They face charges of violating the personal information protection law. Choi and the union official are accused of compiling a blacklist using illegally obtained personal information of employees, which included details about their union membership. This list is believed to have been created around March, coinciding with the union's preparations to launch a general strike over performance-based bonuses.
The unidentified union official, who previously managed the company's internal systems, allegedly obtained a file containing names of over 100,000 employees and handed it to the labor union. In response, Samsung Electronics filed a police complaint on April 10 against unspecified union officials, alleging unauthorized extraction and sharing of employee information unrelated to their duties. A subsequent complaint was lodged on April 16 against the union official in question, accusing him of illegally collecting employee personal information through the company's internal system and providing it to a third party.
Samsung Electronics claimed that the union official accessed the internal system approximately 20,000 times within an hour to view employees' personal information. The police spent nearly five months investigating various circumstances indicating Choi's involvement in creating a union blacklist before confirming the charges against the two individuals.
Additionally, the police referred four other Samsung Electronics employees to prosecutors on the same day on charges of violating the personal information protection law by improperly accessing the company's internal system. These four employees allegedly checked the union membership status of other employees out of curiosity but did not compile or distribute the information.