By Ju-min Park and Heekyong Yang
SEOUL (Reuters) – A workers’ union at South Korea’s Samsung Electronics said on Monday it would launch a general strike until its demands for better pay and time off were met, warning of more damaging actions against the country’s most powerful conglomerate than its own one-day strike last month.
The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), whose roughly 28,000 members make up more than a fifth of the company’s workforce, plans to start the strike on July 8 and is asking the company for commitments such as improvements to performance based bonus system and an extra day of annual leave.
“We are calling a general strike today,” NSEU President Son Woo-mok said during a live YouTube broadcast. “Until our demands are met, we will fight 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 did not immediately comment.
Last month the union organized a strike using annual leave. It was the first time such a strike took place. However, the company said at the time that this would not impact production or operations.
As the world’s largest memory chip maker and one of the largest global smartphone makers, Samsung Electronics’ success is being challenged in some areas, including some advanced chips. It recently replaced the head of its semiconductor unit to deal with what it called a “crisis” hitting 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 increased rapidly after Samsung pledged in 2020 to end its practice of discouraging the growth of organized labor.
(Reporting by Ju-min Park, Heekyong Yang, Jihoon Lee; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jason Neely)
