SEOUL \u2500 South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix’s union members narrowly rejected a tentative wage agreement on Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n
A total of 50.08 percent of the 15,045 workers who cast ballots voted against the agreement, the source said. The difference was just 25 votes, the source added.<\/p>\n
SK Hynix was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters. The source spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to media.<\/p>\n
The agreement, reached last week, included a 6.3 percent wage increase and a revision to SK Hynix’s profit-sharing bonus scheme, under which 40 percent of bonuses would be paid in cash and 60 percent in company shares.<\/p>\n
The world’s second-largest memory chipmaker has been reaping strong profits from booming demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in artificial intelligence applications.<\/p>\n
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By signing up with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Service<\/a> and Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last year, the two sides agreed to set aside 10 percent of annual operating profit to fund profit-sharing bonus payments under a system to remain in place for 10 years.<\/p>\n Under the agreement, 80 percent of the bonus is paid in cash in the year it is awarded, while the remaining 20 percent is deferred over two years.<\/p>\n However, this year, management’s proposal to pay more than half of bonuses in shares met with opposition from some workers concerned about the volatility of SK Hynix’s shares.<\/p>\n The stock hit a record high in June on enthusiasm over the AI boom before slumping on fears that too much money is being spent with insufficient reward.<\/p>\n In May, Samsung Electronics and its unionized workers agreed on a deal on performance pay, averting a major strike at the chipmaker that had threatened to disrupt supplies.<\/p>\n Samsung agreed to allocate 10.5 percent of its annual semiconductor operating profit to special bonuses for chip workers. The bonuses would be paid in company stock, with the immediate sale of a majority of the shares to be restricted.<\/p>\n Shares of SK Hynix were trading down 4.9 percent, compared with a 2.2 percent decline in the benchmark Kospi as of 0036 GMT (8:36 a.m. in the Philippines).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL \u2500 South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix’s union members narrowly rejected a tentative wage agreement on Tuesday, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[25672,2588,16641,23600,2587,335,1666,613,15325,12008,276,67185,2669,241,275,9461,43060,67186,4569,16720,1930],"class_list":["post-131779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sk-hynix","tag-ai-applications","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bonus-payments","tag-hbm-chips","tag-high-bandwidth-memory","tag-kospi","tag-memory-chipmaker","tag-operating-profit","tag-performance-pay","tag-profit-sharing-bonus","tag-samsung-electronics","tag-semiconductor-operating-profit","tag-shares","tag-sk","tag-sk-hynix","tag-sk-hynix-shares","tag-south-korean-chipmaker","tag-special-bonuses","tag-unionized-workers","tag-wage-agreement","tag-wage-increase"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}