Wage Talks Showing Little Progress in Samsung Electronics

This year’s wage talks in Samsung Electronics, which started in January, are showing little progress.

The employers and employees had seven rounds of negotiations for about 10 weeks. The former are insisting on a pay increase of 3 percent or so whereas the latter are demanding 6.36 percent.

In Samsung Electronics, the two sides used to wrap up their wage negotiations in February or early March for 10 years until 2019. However, they failed to do so last year and the same is likely this year. In 2020, the pay was raised by 2.5 percent and the retroactive payment occurred on the April payday.

The employees’ discontent and the slow progress are because not a few companies in the IT sector recently raised their employees’ salaries. NCSoft, where the average length of service is 5.6 years, raised its average annual salary to 105.5 million won last year. The figures are 5.78 years and 102.48 million won in the case of Naver. In Samsung Electronics, the salary is 127 million won but the average length is 12.4 years.

More and more Samsung Electronics employees are complaining about their company’s pay increase rate lower than the industry average. TSMC recently raised its employees’ annual salaries by 20 percent to retain them. LG Electronics announced on March 18 that this year’s wage would be raised by 9 percent, the highest since 2011.

According to industry sources, this year’s agreement is likely to be time-consuming. “The semiconductor and non-semiconductor business units of the company are having separate negotiations and the results of the talks need to be tuned later,” one of them explained, adding, “Last year, the IM and CE divisions went through more competition and made less profits than the DS division but the DS division received less bonuses and complaints arose.”