"Samsung Electronics union in South Korea stages first walkout", 7 June 2024

A workers' union at Samsung Electronics staged its first walkout on Friday, signalling more assertiveness among employees just as South Korea's most powerful conglomerate races to catch up in chips used in artificial intelligence .The National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), whose roughly 28,000 members make up over a fifth of the firm's workforce, said it would stop work for a day to demand better pay...

"The purpose of today's strike action is to have meaningful conversation with management," NSEU official Lee Hyun-kuk told Reuters. He said the union was preparing further action on Friday, without providing details.

Samsung Electronics said there was no impact on production or business activity. The strike fell a day after a public holiday and there were fewer employees on annual leave than on the equivalent day last year, the firm said...

"We have sincerely engaged with the union and will continue talks with them," said a company official...

The strike follows other worker protests in recent weeks outside offices in Seoul as well as outside a chip production site in Hwaseong, south of the capital...

They started after Samsung Electronics decided to increase wages this year by 5.1%. The NSEU, the biggest of five unions at the firm, want further commitments such as improvements to the performance-based bonus system and an extra day of annual leave.

Last week, a coalition of five unions at Samsung affiliates including another smaller Samsung Electronics union called on the NSEU to pursue negotiation rather than confrontation, indicating they would not join the strike...

Any larger scale or protracted industrial action would be a headache for the world's biggest memory chip maker as it scrambles to catch up with rivals making high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI applications...