SEOUL.- Unionized workers at Samsung Electronics in South Korea declared an indefinite strike on Wednesday to pressure the country’s largest company to agree to their demands for higher wages and other benefits.
Thousands of members of the Samsung Electronics National Union had begun a temporary three-day strike on Monday. But the union said on Wednesday it was announcing an indefinite strike and accused management of being unwilling to negotiate. The company said the strikes had not affected production.
“Samsung Electronics will ensure that there are no disruptions to production lines,” the company said in a statement. “The company remains committed to engaging in good faith negotiations with the union.”
However, in a statement on its website, the union said it had carried out unspecified disruptions on production lines to force management to come to the negotiating table if strikes continued.
“We are confident of our victory,” the statement added.
The union did not say how many of its members would join the extended strike. It had initially said that 6,540 of its members had said they would take part in the previous three-day strike.
That’s a small fraction of Samsung Electronics’ estimated workforce of 267,860 worldwide. About 120,000 of them are in South Korea.
Union and management representatives held several rounds of negotiations this year over demands for higher wages and better working conditions, but failed to reach an agreement. Some union members used a day of their annual leave in a coordinated manner in June, in what analysts said was the first strike at Samsung Electronics.
Some 30,000 of the firm’s workers are members of the Samsung Electronics National Union, the company’s largest union, while others belong to smaller groups.
Samsung chief Lee Jae-yong said in 2020, when he was vice chairman of the company, that he would stop suppressing efforts by employees to organize unions, as he expressed regret over his alleged involvement in a massive corruption scandal in 2016 that led to the ouster of the country’s president.
The firm’s anti-union practices have been criticised by activists for decades, although industrial action in other businesses and sectors of society is common in South Korea.
Thousands of South Korean medical residents and trainees have been on strike since February in protest against a government plan to dramatically expand places in medical schools.
Source: With information from AP
