Samsung’s Union Battle and the Crisis Facing Korean Labor
While the South Korean media has been focused on a snap presidential election, an important scandal has emerged involving the union that represents Samsung workers. It’s a cautionary tale about the difficulties facing organized labor in South Korea.
Members of the National Samsung Electronics Union stage a rally as they begin a strike outside the company's factory in Hwaseong, South Korea on July 8, 2024. (Jung Yeon-je / AFP via Getty Images)
Last year saw a historic strike by workers at Samsung, the Korean electronics firm with a global footprint. Yet the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) that organized the strike has since stumbled over an old practice in South Korea’s labor movement — one often used to drive a wedge between the leadership and the rank-and-file members.
The strike last July by a union with more than thirty thousand members that had only formed in 2019 drew attention from both corporations and organized labor worldwide. It broke new ground in a number of significant ways.
Not only was it the first strike by workers at Samsung, a company that had enforced a strict no-union policy for over forty years. It was also the first strike over pay transparency concerning a controversial incentive metric and the first major strike in the global chip industry, where rapid expansion has been coming at the expense of workplace safety.
Fizzling Out
However, this landmark strike fizzled out within about a week. Despite its successes at recruitment, the NSEU still only represents about one-quarter of Samsung’s manufacturing workforce and was unable to completely halt memory chip production. A hard-nosed refusal to engage by Samsung management also demoralized union members.
In November 2024, the union leadership and Samsung nonetheless tentatively reached a four-point collective bargaining agreement, including a wage increase. Almost two-thirds of the members voted it down, after the union leadership put the deal to a vote without disclosing the exact size of the wage hike. Despite this, the NSEU leadership survived a subsequent no-confidence vote.
In March this year, members finally approved a new collective bargaining agreement that included a maximum increase in base salary of 3 percent and an average increase of 2.1 percent in performance payouts, with a ceiling of 5.1 percent overall. The union could not repeal the use of EVA (economic value added), the metric that had helped prompt the walkout because it decoupled incentive compensation for workers from their job performance. Yet the contract ensured the formation of a management-union task force to improve performance metrics and incentive pools.
One month later, in April, a union official called Han Gi-bak went public with claims that Samsung had granted extra wage increases to about seven union officials. According to a section of Han’s new wage contract that I have seen, he received a 6.2 percent rise in his remuneration, including a 1.5 percent increase in incentives. Not only did this exceed the union-approved ceiling, it also made little sense, since union full-timers should not be subject to a performance assessment by management.
The secret increase merely confirmed remarks made a month earlier by NSEU president Son Woo-mok, Han told me. According to the whistleblower, Son disclosed in a meeting (after ensuring there would be no paper trail) that Samsung management had verbally promised him the additional increase for union officials.
A Repurposed Legacy
The questionable pay increase would be likely to puzzle union activists and observers outside South Korea, where union officials are typically paid from union dues as a matter of principle. However, there is a long-running practice of South Korean management paying union officials.
During the dictatorial era between the 1950 and the 1980s, when only company unions were permitted, management covered the salaries of union officials — a practice that set the interests of the leadership and the rank-and-file apart. Since the struggle for democracy in the late 1980s, which saw one of the most vibrant independent union movements in recent global history enter the stage, South Korean labor leaders have repurposed this traditional practice as a sign of managerial acknowledgement of new independent unions.
By 2010, both the independent Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and the less militant Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) opposed new legislation that aimed to prohibit wage payments by employers to unionists. In response, the government introduced an amendment to the labor union act. In effect, the amendment allowed corporate management to continue remunerating union officials through “time-off pay” adjusted by union size — akin to sabbatical arrangements.
The reframed legacy is linked to the continued inability of South Korean organized labor to go beyond an umbrella of workplace-based unions toward solid industrial unionism. The lack of industry-wide resources means that many smaller unions habitually depend on management for paying union officials. Also, it now often appears to disincentivize leaders of large unions from shifting their unions into industrial union structures.
Governments and employers have both sought to curb the development of full-fledged industrial unionism and sectorial bargaining. In December 2022, the now impeached government of Yoon Suk-yeol crushed a strike by truck drivers calling for the expansion of minimum freight rates to cover all truckers. In May 2023, Yang Hoe-dong, the chapter leader of a national construction workers’ union, self-immolated in protest in protest against the government’s criminalization of long-standing union practices. Both unions have since been hollowed out.
Samsung has a long history of using its vast financial resources to undermine campaigns. In 2014, acting in cahoots with the police, the company bribed the long-estranged father of a contract worker who ended his own life in protest of the tech behemoth’s union busting so that he would authorize the police to seize his son’s body from the morgue. It later turned out that the father squandered the money on gambling. In 2015, Samsung sought to break Sharps, the advocacy group for Samsung’s occupational-disease victims, by offering some victims large sums in exchange for deserting the organization.
The union expelled Han and three delegates over the revelations. Sharps, which had been providing consultation to the NSEU on workplace safety following the strike, began a petition drive for their reinstatement. “Strong collective bargaining power is where our hope lies for a Samsung where all workers can work safely without fear of death,” Kwon Young-eun, a full-time Sharps staffer, told me, recalling Samsung’s blood disorder cluster that left hundreds of young workers dead or incapacitated.
In a rare move between two labor organizations, the NSEU sent Sharps an official letter, demanding an end to the petition drive and warning of legal action. The NSEU maintained its innocence in the letter. “The letter does not even warrant a response,” Kwon said. “Even Samsung has never sent a letter of such content.”
On May 15, the Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU), a KCTU affiliate, sent a letter of its own to the NESU, expressing “grave concerns” about the expulsion of Han and the other members. The legal unit of the KMWU has been assisting the NSEU, although the Samsung union is affiliated to the rival FKTU.
According to Han, about five thousand members have resigned from the union since the revelations, “shrinking the union membership from 37,000 to 32,000.” I asked Samsung and the NSEU for comment on Han’s claims but have not yet received a response.
Missing Agenda
The latest controversy involving Samsung appears to have been buried beneath an avalanche of media coverage of the snap presidential election set for June 3. With the conservative People Power Party almost irreversibly fractured after two consecutive impeachments of its presidents within eight years, Lee Jae-myung, the candidate of the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), has emerged as the seemingly invincible front-runner.
The main point of contention between conservative and liberal forces is how far to align themselves with business at home and the United States abroad. Lee swiftly abandoned his pro-labor rhetoric in favor of courting major conglomerates, known as chaebols.
Lee has emphasized his support for a bipartisan bill called the Special Act on the Semiconductor Industry. Not only would this act exempt Samsung and other chip makers from having to pay certain taxes, it also writes off part of their electricity and water bills. Most notably, it allows these corporations to extend the working week beyond the current legal limits. In April, the DPK, which has a majority in the National Assembly, placed the bill on a legislative fast track.
Samsung workers are already being overworked. Han, who is also a developer, spoke to a National Assembly hearing on the bill several months ago, where he appeared as an individual rather than a representative of his union. He described his experience of excessive work in the sector: “After three months of working overtime with no weekends and three days of working all night long, I felt nauseous and vertiginous, with irregular heartbeats.”
He also highlighted the difficulty in petitioning for workers’ compensation, pointing to the law that declares semiconductor materials to be a state secret, making it almost impossible for workers to prove that their illnesses are work-related. “Starkly absent from the bill is any provision on workplace safety,” the Sharps campaigner Kwon remarked.
The plight of Han and his coworkers shows that the new political opening after mass action successfully thwarted President Yoon’s attempted coup last year has yet to translate into tangible improvements to the livelihoods and safety of workers. Without a prompt and strategic revitalization of organized labor and the broader left, this reality is unlikely to change after the snap election, which is poised to deliver a pro-business president fully aligned with the corporate agenda while offering lip service to organized labor.