Around 48,000 workers at Samsung Electronics are expected to begin an 18-day strike on Thursday after negotiations over bonus payments failed to produce an agreement, Reuters reported.
Talks resumed on Wednesday under mediation by South Korea’s labor minister, Kim Young-hoon, raising hopes for a possible compromise. However, union representatives said one unresolved issue prevented a final deal.
Union leader Choi Seung-ho said the union had accepted the latest proposal from the National Labor Relations Commission, but management had not agreed to all of the union’s demands. He added that negotiations would continue during the strike.
Samsung said the union’s demands were excessive and argued that accepting them would undermine the company’s management principles. The dispute centers on performance bonuses, including demands to remove a bonus cap and to allocate a share of annual operating profits to workers.
The union members planning to strike represent about 38% of Samsung’s domestic workforce. Analysts said the impact on supply chains may remain limited unless the strike extends beyond the planned 18 days. A prolonged strike could affect both South Korea’s economy and global semiconductor supply.
Samsung is the world’s largest memory chip maker and accounts for a significant part of South Korea’s exports, along with SK Hynix, a South Korean producer of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory.
