A major union representing tens of thousands of people at the South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday that workers will go on strike for the first time, potentially threatening key global semiconductor supply chains.
A spokesperson said union members, around 20% of the company workforce, or 28,000 people, would use annual leave to strike for one day on 7 June, leaving the door open for a potential general strike down the road.
Management at the firm, the world’s biggest producer of memory chips, have been locked in negotiations with the union over wages since January, but the two sides have failed to narrow their differences.
“We are declaring a strike in the face of the company’s neglect of labourers,” a spokesperson for the National Samsung Electronics Union said at a livestreamed news conference. “We have tried to solve the issue through dialogue.”
The union president, Son Woo-mok, said the union had accepted the pay raise proposed by the company but was asking for one additional holiday plus “a transparent system to measure the performance bonus based on the sales profit”.
“The company is not hearing us and they are not communicating from our last negotiation session,” he said.
A Samsung official said: “Samsung will keep in dialogue with the labour union going forward as it has been.”
“It could lead to a general strike,” the union spokesperson said of the one-day strike, confirming that the action was the company’s “first strike, [and] we believe it is meaningful”.
“Responsibility for all collective action from now lies squarely on the company. We are declaring our stance in the face of the company’s neglect and interference in our peaceful struggle so far.”
Samsung Electronics is one of the world’s largest smartphone makers and one of the only companies globally to produce high-end memory chips used for generative AI, including top-of-the-line AI hardware from industry leaders such as Nvidia. It is the flagship subsidiary of the South Korean giant Samsung Group, by far the largest of the family-controlled conglomerates that dominate business in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
For almost 50 years, Samsung Electronics avoided unionisation of its employees – sometimes adopting ferocious tactics, according to critics – while rising to become the world’s largest smartphone and semiconductor manufacturer.
Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, who died in 1987, was adamantly opposed to unions, saying he would never allow them “until I have dirt over my eyes”.
Internal documents from 2012 obtained by a South Korean MP instructed managers to control “problematic personnel” seeking to establish unions.
“To avoid claims of unfair labour practices, dismiss key organisers before the launch of a union,” it read, among other recommendations.
But in 2019, organisers seized the opportunity presented by the left-leaning government of President Moon Jae-in – a former rights lawyer who represented trade unions – and controversy around the bribery trial of the company’s then vice-chair, Lee Jae-yong, the founder’s grandson, to set up a union.
“Having 20% of its workforce on strike will significantly impact the company as a whole, especially at a time when it needs to act quickly in the ever-evolving semiconductor industry,” said Kim Dae-jong, professor of business at Sejong University.
“Unlike Hyundai Motor, which has dealt with strikes almost annually, Samsung management will struggle to control this situation because it has never dealt with a strike before.”