By Hyunjoo Jin, Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee
Suwon — Samsung Electronics’ union said it would suspend a strike set to begin on Thursday after the two sides reached a tentative pay deal, potentially averting action that threatened to disrupt the production of AI and other chips.
The labour union suspended the planned 18 days of strike action by nearly 48,000 of its members to put the tentative agreement to a vote by its members.
The vote will take place on May 22-27, union leader Choi Seung-ho told reporters. An earlier notice posted on the union’s website had said it would happen on May 23-28.
Samsung Electronics said in a separate statement that the two parties had reached a tentative agreement on wages and collective bargaining and pledged to “build mature and constructive labour-management relations”.
The 11th-hour deal came after days of talks that broke down multiple times, including earlier on Wednesday when the union announced that it would go ahead with the strike. Talks restarted later in the day after South Korean labour minister Kim Young-hoon stepped in to mediate.
The two sides had been at odds over how performance bonuses would be distributed between the conglomerate’s hugely profitable memory business and loss-making logic chip businesses, Reuters had previously reported.
Choi said they had agreed on how to distribute profit to loss-making businesses and would publish details of the tentative plan on the union’s website shortly. He expects the union members to approve the wage deal.
“We will do our utmost to stabilise labour-management relations at Samsung Electronics going forward,” Choi said.
Samsung accounts for almost a quarter of South Korea’s exports and is also the world’s largest memory chipmaker so production disruptions risk fuelling price rises at a time when the AI boom has caused shortages.
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