Samsung's union just watched a $26.6 billion bonus deal blow up its own membership, and the fallout is still spreading.
In May, Samsung Electronics' largest union voted to accept a wage deal worth roughly 40 trillion won, or $26.6 billion, tying special bonuses to 10.5 percent of the operating profit generated by the company's semiconductor business. It was meant to end months of strike threats. Instead, it exposed a fault line inside the company that no bonus check could paper over.
Memory chip workers, the ones building the HBM stacks Nvidia needs for its AI accelerators, are collecting average bonuses of about 567 million won, or roughly $367,000, according to reporting from Tom's Hardware and Bloomberg. Employees making Galaxy phones, televisions and home appliances in Samsung's Device eXperience division got about 6 million won, somewhere around $4,000. That's not a gap, it's a chasm: close to 100 times more money for one division than another, inside the same paycheck cycle, from the same company.
You can guess what happened next. On June 4, Samsung's largest labor body lost its majority status after roughly 18,000 members quit, according to Tech Times and Digitimes. The vote to ratify the deal had already shown the split plainly: within the semiconductor-heavy Trans-Company Union, 80.6 percent voted yes. Among members of the Jeonsamno union, which draws more from non-chip divisions, only 21.1 percent approved. Workers who make the phones you're probably reading this on watched their colleagues down the hall get houses worth of money, and they said no.
Then it got worse. Seoul Economic Daily reported that union leadership, including chair Choi Seung-ho, had quietly revised internal rules to pay itself monthly position allowances out of member dues, on top of full salaries the company already pays them. Choi was collecting about 10 million won a month from a dues pool of roughly 700 million won contributed monthly by members. Five officials controlled decisions that could bind 70,000 workers, and it took just two votes among three attending members to pass an agenda item. For a union already accused of selling out its non-chip members, that looked like leadership taking care of itself first.
Choi called for a confidence vote rather than wait to be pushed. He survived it. The Korea Herald reported that of 54,165 eligible members, 38,336 cast ballots between June 24 and June 30, a 70.8 percent turnout, and 87.5 percent backed him staying on. Surviving a vote is not the same as resolving the grievance that forced it. Choi says he'll now push, in 2027 bargaining, to have the Device Solutions chip division recognized as its own bargaining unit with its own representative, which is effectively an admission that one union speaking for both chip and non-chip workers no longer works.
Part of what's fueling the anger is the neighbor's paycheck. SK Hynix scrapped its own bonus cap last year and now hands out 10 percent of annual operating profit directly to employees. Average bonuses there could run close to 700 million won, about $477,000, this year, on top of a roughly 140 million won profit share already paid out in February, per Tom's Hardware. SK Hynix controls more than half the global HBM market and supplies the chips inside Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs, which is why its payouts have outpaced Samsung's even after Samsung's own concession. Around 200 Samsung employees have already left for SK Hynix over the past four months, drawn by the bigger checks.
The Bank of Korea is watching all of this too. CNBC reported in June that the central bank flagged the size of the Samsung and SK Hynix bonus rounds as a national inflation risk, worried that the money landing in workers' accounts across the chip sector could push consumer prices up faster than its 2 percent target allows.
Frankly, this is the AI boom's labor problem in miniature. When one division of a company rides a genuine windfall, memory chip margins tied directly to the AI buildout, and another division doesn't, you can't paper over the difference with a single wage agreement and expect everyone to feel like colleagues afterward. Samsung just found that out at a cost of 18,000 members and a union chairman who now has to rebuild trust he spent in a single bonus cycle. Other chipmakers running AI and legacy business lines side by side should be paying attention, because the math that broke Samsung's union applies just as easily to them.
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