SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics and representatives of South Korea’s largest labor union, which has been on strike since early last week, have agreed to resume negotiations on Friday, both sides said.
They plan to meet on Friday to draw up a concrete negotiating schedule, Son Woo-mok, chairman of the National Samsung Electronics Union, a labor union with about 30,000 members that makes up nearly a quarter of the company’s South Korean workforce, said during a live broadcast on YouTube.
The union has been on indefinite strike over wages and secondary employment conditions.
Samsung said in a statement that it hopes the strike will be resolved as soon as possible and confirmed that it has proposed an unconditional resumption of dialogue.
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 and Joyce Lee; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
