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Samsung workers protest over huge pay gap with SK Hynix, threaten long strike
Union officials said 40,000 workers joined the rally as Samsung offered 10% of operating profit for performance pay and talks continued.
- On Thursday, April 23, 2026, 40,000 Samsung Electronics workers rallied at the Pyeongtaek, South Korea, complex, demanding transparent compensation and threatening a strike that could disrupt artificial intelligence chip production.
- Chief among worker grievances is a massive bonus pay gap with crosstown rival SK Hynix, as employees argue a chip division worker earning 76 million won in base pay receives only 38 million won in bonuses.
- Demanding a 7 percent wage hike and 15 percent of annual operating profits for bonuses, workers plan to stage an 18-day walkout beginning May 21 if negotiations fail, potentially costing the company more than 1 trillion won daily.
- Management offered 10 percent of operating profit for performance pay and said it would continue working toward a wage agreement, though officials warn production halts from even a single strike could damage customer trust for years.
- Samsung forecast first-quarter operating profit would reach a record 57.2 trillion won amid an AI boom, as the company recently began mass production of next-generation HBM4 memory chips critical for scaling data centers needed for AI development.
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Samsung workers threaten strike, demand share of $38 billion AI memory windfall
Samsung's memory business is central to the current upswing in the chip market. Alongside SK Hynix and Micron, the company is one of the three major producers of DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). These chips are now critical for AI training and inference systems, where memory bandwidth has become as...Read Entire Article
Several tens of thousands of employees of Samsung Electronics have protested in South Korea to demand salary increases, threatening the technological giant of a large-scale strike
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Total News Sources62
Leaning Left12Leaning Right7Center20Last UpdatedBias Distribution51% Center
Bias Distribution
- 51% of the sources are Center
51% Center
L 31%
C 51%
R 18%
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