Samsung union suspends strike as tentative deal reached

The Samsung Electronics union said it would suspend a planned strike after the two sides reached an interim wage agreement, potentially eliminating the threat of disrupting production of artificial intelligence and other chips.

The labor union has suspended 18 days of strike action by its nearly 48,000 members, scheduled to begin on Thursday, to put the interim agreement to a vote by its members.

The vote will be held between May 22 and 27, union leader Choi Seung-ho told reporters.

An earlier announcement published on the union’s website said this would take place between 23-28 May.

The two sides reached a tentative agreement on wages and collective bargaining and pledged to “establish mature and constructive labor-management relations,” Samsung Electronics said in a separate statement.

The 11th hour deal came after days of talks that broke down multiple times, including early Wednesday when the union announced it would continue the strike.

Talks resumed later in the day after South Korean Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon stepped in to mediate.

The two sides had been at odds over how to distribute performance bonuses between the conglomerate’s highly profitable memory business and its loss-making logic chip businesses, Reuters previously reported.

Choi said they agreed on how the profits would be distributed to loss-making businesses and would soon publish the details of the interim plan on the union’s website.

He added that he expects union members to approve the wage agreement.

“Going forward, we will do our best to stabilize labor-management relations at Samsung Electronics,” he said.

Samsung accounts for nearly a quarter of South Korea’s exports and is also the world’s largest maker of memory chips, so production cuts could cause prices to rise at a time when the AI ​​boom is causing shortages.