Samsung and its Union Meet Monday in a Last Attempt to Prevent an 18-Day Chip Factory Strike
May 17, 2026 – 11:54 am
Image by: Kenneth C. Zirkel
TL;DR:
Samsung faces an 18-day chip strike from May 21. The PM has warned of $668M daily losses and hinted at emergency powers.
Samsung Electronics and its largest labour union will resume negotiations on Monday in what South Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-Seok has described as “virtually the last chance” to prevent an 18-day strike at the world’s biggest memory chipmaker. If the talks fail, the union’s 41,000 confirmed participants—a number expected to exceed 50,000—will walk out on 21 May.
The prime minister addressed the nation on Sunday, warning that “if the strike becomes a reality, the economic damage that we have to face would be unimaginable.” Kim estimated the cost at up to 1 trillion won ($668 million) for every day Samsung’s chip factories are shut. He signalled for the first time that the government could resort to emergency powers to prevent the strike if it threatened the national economy.
The head of South Korea’s National Labor Relations Commission will participate in Monday’s talks, elevating the negotiations from a corporate dispute to a matter of direct government intervention. Previous government-mediated negotiations broke down on 12 May after 17 hours of marathon talks that union representative Choi Seung-ho described as 16 hours of waiting and one hour of negotiation.
The Dispute
The dispute centres on how Samsung distributes the profits from the AI boom to its workforce. The union wants Samsung to scrap an existing cap on bonuses, allocate 15% of operating profit to worker bonuses, and formalise those terms in employment contracts. Samsung has proposed allocating 10% of operating profit to bonuses, along with a one-time special compensation package that it says exceeds industry standards.
Company executives have argued that the union’s demands would be difficult to sustain over the long term. The financial context makes the union’s position difficult to dismiss. Samsung’s Q1 2026 revenue reached ₩133.9 trillion (approximately $90 billion), with operating profit of ₩57.2 trillion, an eightfold year-on-year increase and the highest quarterly profit in the company’s history. The semiconductor division alone produced ₩53.7 trillion in operating profit, roughly 94% of the total, driven almost entirely by high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI infrastructure.
While the company’s record profits have doubled the Lee family’s wealth to $45.5 billion in twelve months, workers argue that their compensation has not kept pace. The union’s complaint centres partly on a perceived gap between Samsung’s bonus structure and that of rival chipmaker SK Hynix.