(Lee Seung-hwan)
Samsung Electronics Co.’s union will vote on a tentative labor-management agreement reached Wednesday. The vote starts Friday and runs for three working days through next Wednesday. If the deal is rejected, both sides will return to the bargaining table.
The key issue is a sharp gap in bonuses between business divisions.
Under the deal, employees in the memory chip business within the Device Solutions (DS) division, which has benefited from the semiconductor boom, could receive more than 500 million won ($330,000) in additional performance bonuses.
Employees in the foundry and system LSI businesses in DS, on the other hand, would receive bonuses in the 100 million won range.
The widest gap is between the semiconductor operations and the Device eXperience (DX) division. DX employees are not eligible for the special management performance bonus at the center of the talks and would receive about 6 million won in company shares.
Samsung Electronics’ operating profit is projected at 300 trillion won this year. Under the agreement, up to 31.5 trillion won could be allocated to a semiconductor special management bonus pool. Of that amount, 40 percent would be distributed equally among all employees in the DS division, regardless of business unit, resulting in about 160 million won per employee.
The remaining 60 percent would be allocated to individual business units. The memory division, with about 28,000 employees, and shared DS organizations such as research institutes and global manufacturing infrastructure units, with roughly 30,000 employees, would receive funding at a 1-to-0.7 ratio.
Based on those calculations, memory division employees could receive about 540 million won each when combined with the equal distribution portion, while shared organization employees could receive about 430 million won.
These payments would come on top of standard profit-sharing bonuses applied across both DX and DS. Memory division employees earning annual salaries of about 100 million won are also likely to receive the maximum performance incentive bonus of 50 million won. DX employees, meanwhile, would receive about 6 million won in company shares under the latest deal. On an incremental basis, memory division payouts would be roughly 90 times higher than those in DX.
The disparity has fueled the possibility that employees outside the memory business could reject the tentative agreement.
According to Samsung Electronics Co.’s union, which is centered in DX, membership surged from 3,000 to 11,172 in a single day on Thursday.
Employees in the foundry and system LSI businesses are seen as more likely to support the deal. Under an earlier company proposal, their allocation ratios were significantly lower and penalties were applied, limiting expected payouts to 50 million won to 60 million won.
The union had argued these units deserved greater consideration, which management ultimately accepted.
On Thursday, Samsung Electronics Co. Chief Executive Jun Young-hyun sent an internal message to employees, saying both labor and management remained aligned in their commitment to the company despite disagreements during negotiations. He also acknowledged employee concerns and disappointment through the process.
Experts described the agreement as a win-win outcome. “The use of stock-based compensation with selling restrictions could also support shareholder value and the structure was not directly tied to a fixed share of operating profit, limiting spillover risk to other industries,” said Cho Joon-mo, an economics professor at Sungkyunkwan University.
However, the Korea Shareholder Activist Group, a retail shareholder group that also known as ACT, warned on Thursday it may pursue legal action if the tentative deal proceeds without shareholder approval, saying that a bonus scheme linked to 12 percent of pretax operating profit without shareholder consent would be illegal.
“The tentative labor-management agreement that pre-calculates and allocates 12 percent of pre-tax operating profit as performance bonuses is illegal,” it said. “Without shareholder meeting approval procedures, it is legally invalid.”
The group also noted that if the board of directors submits a resolution to ratify and execute the tentative agreement, it will file a lawsuit seeking confirmation of invalidity and request an injunction.
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