SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics and representatives of South Korea’s largest labor union, which is on strike, met on Tuesday but the talks remained fruitless, the union said.
Since the beginning of this month, the union has been on indefinite strike over wages and secondary employment conditions.
The gap between the two sides is too wide to reach an agreement, said Lee Hyun-kuk, vice chairman of the National Samsung Electronics Union, a labor union with about 30,000 members who make up nearly a quarter of the company’s South Korean workforce, during a live broadcast on YouTube.
Union officials called on the company to present a new offer to the negotiating table by July 29 and to hold final talks with the company through July 31, union representatives said.
Analysts have said a prolonged strike by key workers will compound challenges for Samsung, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, as it struggles to compete in semiconductors used in artificial intelligence.
Samsung says the strike has not disrupted chip production.
(Reporting by Ju-min Park; Editing by Jason Neely)
