Samsung Electronics union announces first-ever strike | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Electronics union announces first-ever strike

techxplore.com

40 pointssharpshadow18 comments

> A spokesperson said union members, around 20 percent of the company workforce, would use annual leave to strike for one day on June 7, leaving the door open for a potential general strike down the road.

Despite the clickbait earlier in the article about disruption to supply chains, this seems quite small.

Interesting strategy. As employee leave is used, this won't cost the union a dime in strike payouts.

Is it really a strike at that point? The company can just revoke leave in the future and call the bluff. Then they'll have to take unpaid leave and risk their jobs for real.

Different countries have different rules,

The company is ultimately limited in how much they can punish the entire workforce without people quitting in mass for other work. Thus the inherent power of unions to negotiate.

Samsung makes up nearly a quarter of South Korea's GDP. I imagine this has a significant impact on the viability of quitting for other work.

Samsung has 0.1 million employees in SK out of a population of 52 million. It’s big, but that also makes it more difficult for them to replace people who quit.

Given the infamous demand for jobs at Samsung, this is a very one-sided negotiation.

Sure, but that’s at their current ultra low turnover rate.

If conditions are actually bad enough for people to be leaving it suddenly becomes much harder to recruit skilled people locally. Especially when there is news coverage of what’s happening.

While the chaebols represent a huge part of the South Korean's GDP, they account for only a small part of the jobs in the country. Whether leaving them for another job is easy, that I don't know. Depending on the country's culture, leaving could also be very bad for future prospects.

> Interesting strategy. As employee leave is used, this won't cost the union a dime in strike payouts.

> Is it really a strike at that point?

IMHO, yes. A strike is about coordinated employee action to to disrupt employer operations. How strikers get paid while doing it is totally irrelevant.

> The company can just revoke leave in the future and call the bluff. Then they'll have to take unpaid leave and risk their jobs for real.

Which would be a massively shitty move on the company's part, and likely to motivate more employees to join the union. After all, getting all your leave canceled is a pretty material reduction in working conditions. Literally, "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

I’m slightly confused by this. They say they are using their leave, but what if management says… no? I mean, it isn’t a strike if they are asking management, but I don’t see how they can say they are using their leave without approval.

Not every country has such terrible worker protections that workers require management approval for any time off they want to take.

I have no idea what the relevant protections are like in Korea, but assuming that all workers always require management approval of fully-accrued paid time off is not always safe.

> I’m slightly confused by this. They say they are using their leave, but what if management says… no? I mean, it isn’t a strike if they are asking management, but I don’t see how they can say they are using their leave without approval.

IIRC, this exact tactic happens in the US, but it uses sick time and is called a "sick out." I suppose that's because management can't realistically can't deny approval for an illness to infect you, so sick time can't be subject to the same kind of control as other leave.

Just for completeness:

> A major union representing tens of thousands of people at South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that workers will go on strike for the first time ever, potentially threatening key global semiconductor supply chains.

If somehow a company becomes

1) so crucial to the global semiconductor supply chain that a blip in their system threatens the whole thing

2) so poorly managed that a one day strike of 20% of their employees threatens their whole operation

That’s just totally unsustainable and nuts. I think it must be an exaggeration on the part of the authors of the article.

>That’s just totally unsustainable and nuts.

That's a very good description of our current semiconductor and shiny tech hardware supply chain.

I mean to some extent sure, I’m always happy to believe the system is pretty stupid.

But on the other hand I’m surprised if 20% of Samsung’s workforce has the power to throw the whole system into chaos but Samsung never figured out a way to take advantage of that, hahaha.

They have. Samsung are an incredibly desirable company to work for, both for pay and for career progression, and hold all of the cards here. Why do you think this "strike" consists of using annual leave?

I mean, that's part of the problem with modern supply chains in general: they've been deliberately consolidating (to ensure those at the top get maximum profits) and stripping any redundancy or buffer to the bone (to ensure that no money is ever spent on something that's not immediately relevant to making more profit).

This is a big part of why the supply chain shocks in COVID, and the Ever Given blocking the Suez, were so very disruptive.

Welcome to the just-in-time ideology, where any minuscule blip in any supplier is amplificated through the supply chain until it becomes a disaster.

It takes a lot of competent management work to create those metastable states and push a system into them.

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