With the artificial intelligence boom reshaping the global economy, workers are racing to defend their rights as the ground shifts beneath them. A narrowly averted strike at Samsung Electronics in Korea this spring was a major test of labor’s ability to fight back.

Weeks before the planned strike, a historic 40,000 Samsung workers rallied outside the company’s semiconductor plant in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, demanding higher bonuses in light of skyrocketing corporate profits and brutal working conditions. In a major concession, Samsung agreed at the last moment to a deal that secures the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus pay for each worker. The mobilization is also particularly significant in light of Samsung’s eighty-year no-union policy, which only ended in 2014 when subcontracted workers at Samsung Electronics Service (a different subsidiary) won the first collective agreement in company history.

During that initial union drive, Myungkyo Hong was an education and propaganda activist for the Korean Metal Workers Union’s Samsung Electronics Service branch and a policy committee member at Samsung Labor Watch. Hong is also a founding member of Platform C, a social movement organization in South Korea that serves as an educational forum and aims to forge solidarity between various social justice movements including those for labor, Palestine solidarity, feminism, and more. Hong currently serves as the editor of Platform C’s East Asian Social Movement Newsletter. Jacobin spoke to Hong about the history of labor fights at Samsung and what semiconductor workers’ recent contract win means for the company’s workforce more broadly.