A South Korean national flag with a Samsung Group flag flutter in front of the companys Seocho building in Seoul. (Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Workers at Samsung Electronics will go on immediate strike, a union chief announced Monday, as a dispute over pay and benefits at the tech giant escalates.
“Until our demands are met, we will fight with the ‘no pay, no work’ general strike,” said Son Woo-mok, head of the National Samsung Electronics Union.
The move follows a one-day walkout in June, the first such collective action at the company which went decades without unionisation.
Son said Samsung Electronics’ latest offer to employees “has angered all members” of the union, which represents around 28 000 workers.
Management at the firm, the world’s biggest producer of memory chips, has been locked in negotiations with the union since January.
The company has offered workers a pay hike of 5.1 percent this year ahead of the June strike.
Rejecting the current offer, the union chief outlined demands including improvements to annual leave and transparent performance-based bonuses.
“The management should be held accountable for all the losses incurred by the strike,” Son said in a live YouTube broadcast.
Samsung Electronics is one of the world’s largest smartphone makers and also one of the only companies globally to produce high-end memory chips used for generative AI, including top-of-the-line artificial intelligence hardware from industry leaders such as Nvidia.
“We haven’t had any official communication from the company yet other than that they have received our strike declaration,” Lee Hyun-kuk, vice president of the union, told AFP late Monday.
Samsung Electronics avoided the unionisation of its employees for almost 50 years — sometimes adopting ferocious tactics, according to critics — while rising to become the world’s largest smartphone and semiconductor manufacturer.
Company 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”.
The first labour union at Samsung Electronics was formed in the late 2010s.
