Samsung Electronics has settled its labor disputes at factory gates and in meeting rooms at its campus south of Seoul. The next fight is scheduled for a different address: the central Seoul residence of Lee Jae-yong, the company’s executive chairman. A union representing workers in Samsung’s consumer-electronics business said it will stage rallies and one-person demonstrations outside Mr. Lee’s home in the Yongsan district beginning next week, and it set no date for them to end.
The dispute is about money, and about how Samsung divides it internally. The union says workers in the company’s DX division, the unit that builds Galaxy phones, televisions and household appliances, have fallen behind colleagues in the DS division, which produces the memory chips that the artificial-intelligence boom has made scarce. The two halves of the company now pay differently, and the union argues the gap has grown too wide to ignore.
Its specific complaints date to this year’s wage round. The union said the labor agreement Samsung signed in May left the DX division on the margins, and it is demanding 1,000 shares of company stock for each DX employee plus a share of operating profit that moves with the division’s own results. The union said it will keep the demonstrations going until management responds to those demands.
The timing is sensitive because the gap the workers describe widened during a windfall. Samsung’s semiconductor unit has swung from an extended downturn into one of the strongest runs in its history, powered by demand for high-bandwidth memory, the advanced chips that sit inside the servers running large language models. The business competes with SK Hynix and Micron, and its recovery has given Samsung pricing power in one of the industry’s most contested products.
Bonuses at Samsung are not fixed. A large part of compensation is paid as an annual incentive award calculated from each division’s profit against its plan, which means payouts differ sharply from one unit to another in any given year. In the years when memory chips were losing money, semiconductor workers felt the reverse of today’s complaint; now that chips drive the company’s profits, the device side wants the formula to treat it the same way.
The DX side is not a laggard in the portfolio. Galaxy phones remain among the best-selling devices in the world, and Samsung has led global television shipments for nearly two decades. Union members argue that success has not translated into pay, and that the May agreement locked in a split that favors the semiconductor unit at the expense of the division where most of the company’s employees work.
Industrial action remains uncommon at Samsung Electronics, which operated without unions for most of its history. The company’s largest labor group, the National Samsung Electronics Union, staged the first strike in Samsung’s modern history in the summer of 2024, walking out over pay and bonus formulas in a series of protests that drew national attention. Last year’s negotiations ended without a walkout, and the May agreement this year was meant to extend that peace; the planned protest suggests it did not satisfy everyone.
Bringing the fight to a chairman’s doorstep is a step beyond the picket lines Korean labor usually mounts. Strikes in the country’s manufacturing heartland are fought at plant gates and at the offices of the labor ministry, and corporate leaders are rarely the targets of residential demonstrations. The choice of location appears deliberate: the Yongsan district is home to foreign embassies and expensive apartments, and the street outside Mr. Lee’s house sits in full view of the news media that covered his legal troubles for years.
Mr. Lee, the grandson of Samsung’s founder, took over the group after his father’s death in 2020. He spent part of the past decade entangled in a corruption case, was pardoned in 2022, and has since tried to present a quieter, more conciliatory Samsung, including a public apology for the company’s long refusal to deal with unions. A sustained protest at his residence would test that posture in public, whatever it does to production.
The union behind the plan is one of several inside the company rather than its largest, and a demonstration on a residential street will not stop a single chip from shipping. Its effect, if any, will be reputational and political, aimed at the image Mr. Lee has cultivated since returning to public life. The same AI boom that enriched semiconductor workers has begun to create pay tensions across the Korean chip industry, where companies compete fiercely for engineers and pay bonuses that few other employers match.
For the DX workers, the arithmetic is simple: the memory division is making money at a scale the company has rarely seen, the device division employs most of its people, and the May agreement gave those people what they consider an unfair share. Beginning next week, the union plans to make that argument where Mr. Lee cannot avoid it. No end date has been announced, which is its own message.
