TL;DRSamsung 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.
