By Ju-min Park and Heekyong Yang
SEOUL (Reuters) – A union at South Korea’s Samsung Electronics announced on Monday it would launch a general strike until demands for better wages and more time off are met, warning of even more damaging measures against the country’s most powerful conglomerate than last month’s one-day strike.
The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), whose approximately 28,000 members make up more than a fifth of the company’s workforce, plans to begin strike action on July 8, asking the company for commitments such as improvements to its performance-based bonus system and an extra day of vacation each year.
“We are calling for a general strike today,” Son Woo-mok, chairman of NSEU, said during a live YouTube broadcast. “Until our demands are met, we will fight with the ‘no pay, no work’ general strike.”
The union will announce more details about the strike on Tuesday, it said in a statement.
Samsung Electronics has not yet commented.
Last month, the union organized a strike using annual leave, the first time such a strike had taken place. However, the company said at the time that it had no impact on production or operations.
As the world’s top memory chip maker and a major global smartphone maker, Samsung Electronics’ success is being challenged in some areas, including some advanced chips. It recently replaced the head of its semiconductor unit to navigate what it called a “crisis” that has hit the industry.
A larger-scale or prolonged strike would become a headache for Samsung as the company struggles to keep up with competitors who make High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips used in AI applications.
Union membership surged after Samsung pledged in 2020 to stop discouraging the growth of organized labor.
(Reporting by Ju-min Park, Heekyong Yang, Jihoon Lee; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jason Neely)
