Approximately 28,000 Samsung employees, discontented over wage issues, staged a protest today, but many likely used their holiday leave to participate. This approach to industrial action is notably polite and far from militant.
These workers are part of the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), which opted for a “coordinated use of vacation” to voice their concerns, according to deputy union chief Lee Hyun-guk. Protesting working conditions by using vacation days is an unusually courteous strategy. This strike’s politeness is heightened by the fact that Thursday was South Korea’s Memorial Day, making a long weekend with Friday off a common occurrence.
One local media outlet even suggested that Samsung management encouraged employees to use their annual leave on this day.
The actual number of striking workers may be lower than the reported 28,000, as the NSEU has faced accusations of inflating its membership. Allegedly, the union has used stolen internal account information of non-union employees to falsely boost their numbers, a charge made by the head of Samsung Electronics Device Experience branch via internal messaging boards.
The NSEU has refrained from disclosing the exact number of strikers, leaving it to individual employees to reveal their participation.
Regardless of the true figures, union members have placed protest notices on Samsung facility doors, and the planned action is underway. This event marks the NSEU’s inaugural strike. Samsung has also been dealing with reports about Nvidia’s dissatisfaction with its HBM quality and other regulatory challenges.
The protest notice, shared on the NSEU’s website, claims that Samsung management has reneged on promises to improve vacation benefits for employees while awarding bonuses to top executives. The notice criticizes management for urging employees to tighten their belts while attributing poor business performance to managerial failures, such as the lackluster performance of Samsung’s high bandwidth memory products and the 2022 Game Optimizing Service (GOS) debacle, which led to an FTC investigation.
Negotiations between the union and Samsung have been tumultuous, with reports of discussions descending into shouting matches. The union is pushing for a 6.5 percent wage increase this year, but management has set it at 5.1 percent during a labor-management council that excluded union representatives.
The union also seeks to change the bonus calculation method to be based solely on operating profit, rather than a combination of operating profit and cost of capital, which resulted in no bonuses for workers last year.
Despite the strike, there are few visible signs of unrest outside Samsung facilities. Lee Hyun-guk described the action to Bloomberg as a “soft start” and a “symbolic move,” warning that if management continues to ignore them, a full-scale general strike could ensue.
TrendForce, a market analyst firm, noted that while the strike had been anticipated, it is unlikely to affect DRAM and NAND Flash production or cause shipment shortages. The timing, on a day when many had already planned to take leave, allowed for pre-emptive adjustments in production schedules and manpower allocation, with fabs largely relying on automated production that requires minimal human labor.
