By Kyu-seok Shim
SEOUL, May 22 (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics’ workers in South Korea on Friday began voting on a pay deal that ensures huge bonuses for its memory chip workers, but other employees who didn’t fare as well said they plan to oppose it.
The 11th-hour government-mediated agreement reached this week averted a planned 18-day strike in a win for the company as well as the South Korean economy.
The negotiations with Samsung’s management were led by a representative from the company’s chip division, who has said he expects the agreement to be ratified.
His union bloc, known as the Samsung Electronics Labor Union (SELU), said on Friday that 32,882 of 57,290 eligible SELU members had already cast their ballot. How they voted was not disclosed.
Approval requires a simple majority of eligible unionised members to vote in favour and a majority of those members to take part. Otherwise negotiations must restart from scratch.
The total number of Samsung unionised members who were eligible to vote was not immediately clear as some employees belong to more than one union. SELU rules also stipulate that members who are behind on union dues are not eligible to vote.
HUGE BONUSES BUT ONLY FOR SOME
The deal primarily benefits workers in Samsung’s memory chip business, which has seen profits soar amid the AI boom. Some of those workers are set to receive bonuses of about $416,000 this year.
Workers in Samsung’s foundry and logic chip units will receive much smaller but still substantial bonuses, while those employed in other divisions like smartphones and home appliances will receive even smaller bonuses.
“This round of negotiations has effectively been reduced to bargaining over bonuses for the semiconductor memory division,” Lee Ho-seop, a leader of the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), told a news conference on Friday, adding that “a rushed outcome was produced.”
A separate union, the Samsung Electronics Co Union (SECU), also attended the Friday press conference.
It was not immediately clear if its members – who include chip workers as well as non-chip workers – were eligible to vote as disagreements with the other union blocs caused the SECU to leave the negotiating team before the agreement was reached.
Samsung declined to comment on the complaints about the agreement from the NSEU and SECU.
The voting, which is being conducted electronically, runs until 10:00 a.m. on May 27.
Samsung’s stock finished 2.3% lower on Friday after hitting a record high earlier in the day. It had surged 8.5% on Thursday in the wake of the deal with the union.
(Reporting by Kyu-seok Shim; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
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