Excluded workers launch legal fight to block wage pact Union leaders for Samsung Electronics' consumer-electronics workers speak to reporters outside the company's Suwon campus in Gyeonggi Province on Friday as voting opened on a wage deal they say shuts their members out. (Yonhap) Samsung Electronics' tentative wage agreement is set to be approved this week, ending a five-month labor dispute that nearly triggered the company's largest-ever strike. But the workers the deal leaves out are going to court to stop it.Turnout in the union ratification vote passed 86 percent as of Monday morning, the fourth day of balloting, according to the company's largest union. The electronic vote closes at 10 a.m. Wednesday and approval is widely expected. Roughly 80 percent of that union's eligible voters work in the semiconductor division, the agreement's main beneficiary, and the deal carries on a simple majority.What divides the workforce is the size of the gap the deal locks in. Signed last Wednesday just hours before a planned strike, the agreement creates a special bonus for the chip division funded by 10.5 percent of an agreed measure of business performance, with no individual cap. Under industry profit assumptions, memory-chip employees could each receive close to 600 million won ($398,000) in combined incentives this year.But workers in the consumer-electronics division, which makes smartphones, televisions and home appliances, receive 6 million won in company stock.That gap has turned the dispute into open conflict between Samsung's rival unions. Korean firms can host several competing unions, and a separate union, made up mostly of consumer-electronics staff, has swelled from roughly 2,600 members to more than 12,000 as employees angered by the deal joined in protest.None of them can vote on it. The largest union, which holds bargaining authority, has excluded the consumer-electronics union from the vote on the grounds that it quit the joint negotiating bloc earlier this month, a reading the Labor Ministry has supported. The smaller union, calling the exclusion an abuse of discretion, says it has retained lawyers to seek an injunction halting the vote and a ruling voiding it.Resentment is not confined to the consumer-electronics side. Because the bonus is weighted toward business-unit performance, foundry and chip-design employees, whose units are treated as loss-making, stand to receive a fraction of what memory staff get.Choi Seung-ho, head of the largest union, said he would put his own leadership to a confidence vote in June regardless of the result, a sign of how contested the deal remains even among the workers it rewards.The headline payout, in any case, is conditional. The special bonus is paid only when the chip division clears steep annual profit targets, under a framework meant to run for a decade. The same division posted a multitrillion-won operating loss as recently as 2023, during the last memory downturn.A second challenge is coming from shareholders. A minority-shareholder advocacy group argues that committing a share of profit to employees ahead of dividends and taxes is unlawful without shareholder approval. It plans to demand an extraordinary general meeting once it obtains the company's shareholder register, a request Samsung has already granted.