The union representing striking workers at South Korea’s Samsung Electronics says a temporary walkout will continue indefinitely.
About 6,500 members of the National Samsung Electronics Union began a three-day strike Monday, just weeks after staging a one-day strike, the first ever against the world’s biggest maker of semiconductor memory chips and smartphones.
The union announced in a statement Wednesday that it would continue its strike because Samsung management is unwilling to enter negotiations.
NSEU represents more than 30,000 Samsung Electronics workers, nearly a quarter of the company’s total workforce. The union said in its statement that the strike has disrupted some of the company’s production lines, and predicted the company will return to the negotiating table “on their knees.”
But Samsung officials say the strike has had no effect on production, and that the company “remains committed to engaging in good faith negotiations with the union.”
NSEU has been negotiating with Samsung since January over a new contract. The union is seeking a 3.5% pay increase and an extra vacation day.
For decades Samsung Electronics, the flagship company of Samsung Group, South Korea’s biggest family-owned conglomerate, had openly resisted the idea of allowing its workers to unionize.
The company recently announced a larger-than-expected 15-fold increase in profits during the second quarter of this year, thanks to a growing surge of artificial intelligence technology and the need for advanced memory chips to power AI applications.
Some information for this report came from Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
