To put pressure on Samsung Electronics, the largest firm in South Korea, to grant their demands for increased pay and other perks, unionized workers at the company announced an indefinite strike on Wednesday.
On Monday, thousands of members of the National Samsung Electronics Union began a three-day temporary strike. However, the union said that management was unwilling to talk and announced on Wednesday that it was going on an indefinite strike. Production has not been hampered, according to Samsung Electronics.
According to a Samsung statement, “Samsung Electronics will make sure that there are no delays in the manufacturing processes.” “The business is still dedicated to holding sincere talks with the union.”
But the union claimed in a statement on its website that it has interfered with the company’s production lines in an unspecified way in an effort to force management to eventually sit down for talks if the strikes carry on.
“We are certain that we will win,” the union declared.
How many of the union’s members would participate in the protracted strike was not stated in the statement. 6,540 of its union members have previously declared their intention to take part in the three-day walkout.
That would only make up a small portion of Samsung Electronics’ presumably 267,860 global workforce. In South Korea, there are roughly 120,000 of them.
Union members and management had rounds of discussions earlier this year over the union’s demands for improved working conditions and increased wages, but they were unable to come to a consensus. Observers claimed that a one-day walkout by certain union members in June, using their collective yearly breaks, was the first labor strike at Samsung Electronics.
The largest union at Samsung, the National Samsung Electronics Union, is said to represent some 30,000 employees, and other employees are members of smaller unions.
2020 saw Samsung CEO Lee Jae-yong, who was the company’s vice chairman at the time, apologize for his purported role in the major 2016 corruption scandal that resulted in the removal of the nation’s president from power and declare that he would no longer repress employee attempts to form unions.
Notwithstanding the fact that labor actions at other companies and in other spheres of society are routine in South Korea, activists have been criticizing the company’s union-busting practices for decades.
Since February, thousands of South Korean medical residents and interns have been on strike in opposition to a government proposal to drastically raise the number of admissions to medical schools.