Samsung Electronics workers in South Korea stage first strike in the company’s 55-year history

July 12, 2024

Unionized workers at Samsung Electronics in South Korea began a strike on Monday to demand better wages and other benefits after months of negotiations with the company. Originally planned to last just three days, the union called an “indefinite general strike” on Wednesday. The strike is significant because it is the company’s first official walkout since it was founded in 1969.

Samsung Electronics’ Seocho building in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, July 5, 2024. Union members at Samsung Electronics began an indefinite strike for higher wages and other benefits on Wednesday, July 10 (AP Photo/(AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

The striking workers belong to the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), which is affiliated to the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU). Samsung Electronics is the flagship of the Samsung Group, one of the giant family-run conglomerates in South Korea, known as chaebol.

The NSEU is demanding a 5.6 percent wage increase, implementation of the promised paid leave, and compensation for lost wages during the strike. It is also demanding transparent policies to explain the company’s bonus system, which is tied to Samsung’s operating profits. Currently, the company can claim a department has not made a profit to refuse to pay bonuses, regardless of how much work workers have actually done. As with other major companies in South Korea, bonuses make up a significant portion of workers’ pay, meaning withholding bonuses amounts to a pay cut.

That’s exactly what happened last year when workers at Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor manufacturing division, Device Solutions (DS), were denied bonus payments after the company claimed that DS had posted an operating loss of 15 trillion won ($11 billion) due to falling demand, despite DS having been a cash cow for Samsung in previous years. This led to a large influx of DS workers into the NSEU.

The workers first protested on June 7. The union and the press called it a strike. However, it was not a real strike; instead, the union asked the workers to take their vacation to have the day off. Only a limited number of workers participated, but the union did not say how many there were.

On July 8, the NSEU began a three-day strike. The union had previously stated: “Due to the dishonest attitude we showed during the negotiations, management bears full responsibility for all the loss of business caused by the strike.”

Another five-day strike was planned to begin on July 15, but the union changed its plans and began an “indefinite” strike, saying the company had refused to enter into negotiations during the first strike.

Samsung claimed that there were no disruptions to operations after the first three days of the strike. “We plan to make thorough preparations to ensure that production is not interrupted. We will continue to try to resume dialogue with the union,” a company official said. Samsung said it was considering hiring strikebreakers if the strike continued.

The NSEU is the largest union at Samsung Electronics with 30,657 members. That’s about a quarter of the company’s total workforce of 124,804 employees. However, according to the union, only 6,540 workers are taking part in the strike, most of them from the DS department.

In addition to the NSEU, there are four other unions at Samsung Electronics. Last August, the NSEU was designated as the representative bargaining organization, meaning that any deal the union reaches with the company serves as the basis for agreements with the other unions. That status expires next month.

The fact that a large number of semiconductor production workers are taking part in the strike is significant. The chips are not only used in devices such as smartphones, but also in the manufacture of military hardware. Samsung is considered a key player in US imperialism’s efforts to secure supply chains outside China in preparation for war. To underscore this, US President Biden made the Samsung semiconductor plant in Pyeongtaek his first stop during a trip to South Korea in 2022.

This puts Samsung workers in a position to significantly undermine Washington’s war against Russia in Ukraine and its war drive against China. Both conflicts are supported by the right-wing government of Yoon Suk-yeol in Seoul and threaten to degenerate into a catastrophic global conflict.

But like its trade union colleagues around the world, the NSEU’s perspective is to limit the struggle to Samsung Electronics and even isolate it from other workers within the Samsung group, not to mention workers at home and abroad who face the same repressive conditions and the same threat of war that capitalism brings.

In fact, the union fully accepts Samsung’s exploitation of workers, as long as the company meets conditions that make it easier for the NSEU to sell this exploitation to the workforce. The union called on the company to pay appropriate bonuses, stating that “if all workers work with passion, Samsung has the potential to overcome all the challenges” it faces from competition in the global semiconductor market, including domestic rivals such as SK Hynix and international ones such as the leading Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

This means workers are being pitted against each other in a race to the bottom. The NSEU has already lowered its demand for a pay rise to accommodate Samsung’s demands. The 5.6 percent it is now demanding is lower than the 6.5 percent the union had been demanding in recent months, which was already down from the 8.1 percent it had publicly demanded when negotiations first broke down in February.

At the same time, Samsung Electronics is currently enjoying a huge increase in profits. In the first quarter of this year, the company posted an operating profit of 1.91 trillion won (US$1.4 billion). On July 5, the company announced that its operating profit in the second quarter rose 1,452.2 percent year-on-year to 10.4 trillion won (US$7.6 billion). In the third quarter, the company’s operating profit is expected to increase another 400 percent year-on-year.

None of the unions in South Korea will wage a struggle against Samsung, any other company or the government. The NSEU’s umbrella organization, the FKTU, is the more openly pro-business organization of the two major union groups in South Korea. The other is the so-called “militant” Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

The NSEU has been in touch with the KCTU during the current strike to work with so-called strike trainers. However, the KCTU has no plans to expand the strike or split workers from the yellow FKTU. The KCTU has a long history of betraying workers’ struggles, including the truck drivers’ strike in late 2022, which had a significant impact on major industry. Instead, the KCTU, which supports the Democratic Party, hopes to swell its own ranks of dues-paying members and thus its coffers.

Samsung ended its “union freedom policy” in 2020 because it knew it had nothing to fear from either the FKTU or the KCTU. It also came under pressure from the then-Democrat Moon Jae-in government. Rather than standing with workers, Moon and the Democrats relied on unions to suppress class struggle. This was especially true after the mass protests in 2016 and 2017 that forced President Park Geun-hye from office, and during the Covid-19 pandemic to keep workers employed so that the profits of major corporations were not affected.

As workers’ working conditions continue to come under attack by the bourgeoisie and the threat of war spreading from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific looms, the ruling class will increasingly rely on unions to bind workers to the capitalist system.