By Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee
SEOUL (Reuters) – A union at South Korea’s Samsung Electronics has called for a strike from July 8 to 10, a union official said on Tuesday, stepping up widespread strikes against the country’s most valuable company.
The union is determining how many workers will join the strike, the official told Reuters by telephone.
Son Woo-mok, leader of the union, said Monday night that the union wants a more transparent bonus and time-off system and that the company treats him as an equal partner.
Samsung declined to comment on the union’s strike plan.
The share price was unaffected, rising 0.1% in morning trading, while the benchmark price index fell 0.7%.
Union membership grew rapidly after Samsung pledged in 2020 to stop discouraging the growth of organized labor.
Two analysts told Reuters the strike itself is unlikely to have a major impact on chip production, as production at the world’s largest memory chip maker is largely automated.
But the ultimate impact will depend on how many people running chip factories participate and for how long, said senior researcher Kim Yang-Paeng of the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.
“Chip production cannot continue with replacement workers” if the people operating the automated machines are out of work for extended periods of time “due to the specificity and expertise of the work,” Kim said.
Last month, workers took vacation en masse on the same day, effectively the union’s first industrial action. Samsung said at the time that there was no impact on production or business activity. The strikers were mainly working in downtown offices rather than manufacturing sites, analysts said.
“This planned strike marks a turning point in Samsung’s history of non-union management. This can be seen as a decline in employee loyalty at Samsung … caused by wages and disappointing compensation compared to Samsung’s rivals,” a Seoul-based analyst said on Tuesday, declining to be named because details of the strike were unknown.
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee; Writing by Ju-min Park; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Christopher Cushing)
