Following a one-day walkout against the nation’s most powerful company last month, a workers’ union at Samsung Electronics in South Korea threatened to go on strike until its demands for increased salary and paid time off were granted.
The latest actions by the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) in South Korea said that its members will go on strike until their demands for higher pay and longer vacation time are met.
The Union, which employs around 28,000 people and accounts for more than 5% of the company’s workforce, plans to start the walkout on July 8 and is requesting concessions from the business, including an extension of the company’s annual leave policy and changes to its performance-based bonus structure.
Newsng gathered that the strike targeted Samsung’s chip division, which makes a wide range of vital components including RAM, NAND flash chips, USB sticks, SD cards, Exynos CPUs, camera sensors, modems, NFC chips, and power/display controllers.
“We are declaring a general strike today,” Son Woo-mok, president of NSEU, said on a live YouTube broadcast. “Until our demands are met, we will fight with the ‘no pay no work’ general strike.”
The union will provide more details regarding the strike on Tuesday, it said in a statement.
The National Samsung Electronics Union vice president, Lee Hyun-kuk, called this action “largely symbolic, but it’s a beginning.”
He underlined that if management does not resolve the union’s issues, the union has backup plans for more strikes.
Lee went on to say that a full-scale general strike is still possible, highlighting the union’s will to pursue its goals. In contrast to the company’s proposed 5.1% rise, the union is advocating for a 6.5% wage increase, an extra day of yearly leave, and a more open method of bonus calculation.
Because bonuses account for a sizable portion of employee compensation, they are especially noteworthy.
We earlier reported that according to the data released by research firm IDC, Apple’s smartphone shipments decreased by almost 10% in the first quarter of 2024 as a result of fiercer competition from Android smartphone manufacturers vying for the top spot.
