SEOUL, May 12 (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics’ labour union in South Korea said on Tuesday it would walk out \u200cof ongoing pay negotiations if no mediation proposal was \u200coffered within two hours.<\/p>\n
The two sides have so far been unable to narrow \u200btheir differences after marathon discussions under the government-mediated process.<\/p>\n
The company is sticking to its proposal of assigning 10% of operating profit to a performance bonus pool, union representative Choi Seung-ho told reporters.<\/p>\n
He \u200csaid it has been \u2060waiting for a mediation proposal for three hours.<\/p>\n
Samsung was not immediately available for comment.<\/p>\n
The union has \u2060demanded the company commit 15% of operating profit to a performance bonus pool, scrap a cap on bonus pay currently set \u200bat 50% \u200bof annual base salary, and \u200bkeep such changes in place \u200cbeyond this year.<\/p>\n
Samsung workers have been angered by what they call a massive gap in bonus pay with rival SK Hynix, which beat Samsung in delivering high bandwidth memory for artificial intelligence chip units to Nvidia following the release of ChatGPT \u200cin late 2022.<\/p>\n
SK Hynix last year \u200babolished its pay cap, resulting in \u200bbonuses more than three \u200btimes higher than those offered to Samsung workers, \u200csparking a surge in Samsung union \u200bmembership.<\/p>\n
Employees’ frustration has \u200bbeen exacerbated by Samsung’s record profits as the AI boom drives up demand for chips. Samsung last week became \u200bonly the second \u200cAsian company after TSMC to have a market capitalisation \u200bof more than $1 trillion.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin. Editing by \u200bLouise Heavens and Mark Potter)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL, May 12 (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics’ labour union in South Korea said on Tuesday it would walk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[10356,10355,3532,127,276],"class_list":{"0":"post-13942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-samsung-electronics","8":"tag-bonus-pay","9":"tag-labour-union","10":"tag-performance-bonus","11":"tag-samsung","12":"tag-samsung-electronics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13942","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=13942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}