By Heekyung Yang and Joyce Lee
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd workers’ union has called a strike from July 8 to 10, a union official said on Tuesday, as it steps up industrial action against the country’s most valuable company.
The official told Reuters by phone that the union was in the process of determining the number of workers who would join the strike.
The union wants a more transparent system for bonuses and leave, and wants the company to treat it as an equal partner, union leader Son Woo-mok said late Monday.
Samsung declined to comment on the union’s proposed strike plan.
The company’s share price was unaffected, rising 0.1% in morning trading versus a 0.7% decline in the benchmark price index.
Union membership has risen rapidly after Samsung pledged in 2020 to stop discouraging the growth of organized labor.
The strike itself is unlikely to have a major impact on chip production because most production at the world’s largest memory chipmaker is automated, two analysts told Reuters.
But any impact will ultimately depend on how many people work at participating chip factories and how long they participate, said senior researcher Kim Young-baeng at the Korea Institute of Industrial Economics and Trade.
“Chip production cannot proceed with replacement workers” if the people operating the automated machines are out of work for a long time “because of the specificity and expertise of the work,” Kim said.
Last month, workers took a collective annual leave on the same day, in the first real union action. At the time, Samsung said the strike had not affected production or business activity. Analysts said the strikers were mostly working in city offices rather than at manufacturing sites.
“This planned strike marks a turning point in Samsung’s history of non-union management. This can be seen as a decline in employee loyalty at Samsung… due to disappointing wages and compensation compared to Samsung’s competitors,” a Seoul-based analyst said Tuesday. The analysts declined to be identified because details of the strike were not known.
