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Who Can Stop Semiconductor Production? Capital Vintage and Worker Representation at Samsung Electronics in the Age of AI Chips, 2018–2025

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2026

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Yoehan Oh*
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Department of Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
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Abstract

The 2024 strike at Samsung Electronics in South Korea was the first in the company’s fifty-five-year history. It sought to disrupt production first on less-automated foundry lines producing legacy semiconductors and then on highly automated lines producing high-bandwidth memory, stacked memory for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. Production effects remained contested, and stoppages yielded no clear bargaining gain. This article argues that capital investment and automation distribute labor power unevenly within a firm: differences in production systems’ age and degree of automation can separate sites of greater potential labor leverage from those of greater strategic value. I call this relationship among fixed-capital age, automation, and labor dependence “capital vintage.” At Samsung, newer capacity producing its most valuable chips was more automated, while older lines remained more labor-dependent but less strategically valuable. Capital vintage anchors the analysis of leverage, legibility, and legitimacy. The strike showed that potential production leverage did not automatically make wage demands publicly legible, especially when strikers were portrayed as among the country’s top earners. The union therefore gave greater weight to an existing occupational-health strategy, drawing on decades of civil-legal conflicts that made injured workers’ bodily harm a recognizable basis for claims against Samsung. Yet its 2025 internal crisis showed that public legibility could not substitute for representative legitimacy, which depended on union members’ support. The article brings workers who manufacture AI’s material foundations into scholarship on worker power and automation. It draws on Korean- and English-language daily, union and company documents, statutory instruments, and civil-society materials.

Keywords

automationunion organizingSamsung Electronicssemiconductorelectronicsartificial intelligencehigh-bandwidth memorySouth Koreaoccupational healthunion democracy

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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 20
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

Introduction

The 2024 strike at Samsung Electronics (hereafter SEC: Samsung Electronics, Co.), led by the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU), was the first in the South Korea-headquartered electronics and semiconductor giant’s fifty-five-year history.Footnote 1 Recent as it is, the strike unfolded within longer histories of industrial automation in the global high-tech industry, labor organizing in the South Korean electronics industry, and occupational-disease claims against SEC. The strike raises a central question: how does uneven automation within an artificial intelligence (AI)-era production system shape workers’ capacity to disrupt production, make their claims publicly recognizable, and hold their representatives accountable?

This article argues that automation and capital investment distribute workers’ potential structural power unevenly within firms. I call the relationship among fixed-capital age, automation, and labor dependence “capital vintage.” At SEC, older 8-inch lines remained more dependent on human labor, while newer, highly automated 12-inch lines produced the most strategically valuable chips. Sites of greatest strategic value therefore did not necessarily offer workers the greatest potential leverage. The article follows this mismatch from production leverage to public legibility and internal legitimacy. The stoppages’ effects remained contested and yielded no clear bargaining gain; occupational health offered a more recognizable public claim, but the 2025 governance crisis showed that public legibility could not substitute for accountability to members.

The argument engages, first, the literature on workers’ structural power and its relation to automation. Beverly Silver and John Womack locate labor’s leverage in workers’ position within production, particularly at chokepoints where a stoppage can propagate.Footnote 2 Automation can alter those positions by reducing or relocating production’s dependence on human labor. Relatedly, David Noble emphasizes managerial efforts to use automation and erode workers’ control over production, while Matt Vidal cautions against explaining technological and organizational change solely through the imperative of labor control.Footnote 3 The Samsung Electronics case specifies these arguments within a single firm: capital vintage distributed potential structural power unevenly, separating older, more labor-dependent facilities from newer and more strategically valuable lines. Automation reduced workers’ capacity for disruption where production was most valuable, but the evidence does not establish that this pattern of investment was chosen specifically to weaken labor, even as the Samsung conglomerate (also called chaebol in Korean) pursued anti-union policies through other means.

Second, the article speaks to scholarship on symbolic politics and occupational health. Jennifer Jihye Chun showed how workers in the lower tiers in the Korean and American labor markets—including university janitors, contracted home care workers, and golf caddies —with little structural power, contested moral legitimacy in public.Footnote 4 The Samsung case extends this argument to highly paid industrial workers, whose top earners position did not make their wage claim public sympathetic. They turned to a different register, the occupational health strategy, which drew on a decades-long history in which injured bodies had struggled to become a recognizable ground of claims against Samsung.Footnote 5

A parallel history of labor and technology emerges from trans-Pacific approaches to computing history, which move beyond treating Asian developments as derivative extensions of a U.S.-centered story.Footnote 6 Sangwoon Yoo and Dongwon Jo give this broader framework a shop-floor and materially asymmetric form. They show how workers at Hanguk Semiconductor’s Bucheon fab in the 1970s, the predecessor of Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor division, connected formal technological resources from the United States with informal local resources in Korea through what the authors call “re-pairing.” Those workers nevertheless remained acutely aware of their peripheral position and turned their own unrecognized labor into a resource through “strategic invisibility.” In 2024, SEC’s union faced the opposite task: making bodily harm visible.Footnote 7

The article draws on Korean- and English-language daily and labor-press reporting, union and company documents, statutory instruments, and civil-society materials. The last category does particular work, because a union’s internal politics are largely closed to outside view. When the NSEU disciplined its internal critics in 2025, the record of critics’ arguments was reproduced outside the union. Their statements appeared on the website of Supporters for the Health And Rights of People in the semiconductor industry (SHARPS; widely known in South Korea as Banolim). Those statements in a prominent occupational-health NGO, prompted labor-press reporting and a public statement from an industrial union. Without these sources, the critics would appear in the record only as subjects of union discipline.

It proceeds in four movements: the South Korean electronics and semiconductor sector’s labor history and Samsung’s place in it; the plural union field of SEC employees that formed between 2018 and 2023 and the automated floor by 2023; the 2024 strike, from escalation without leverage to the occupational-health reweighting as a new source of legibility; and the legitimacy crisis in the NSEU’s internal governance of 2025.

A brief labor history of South Korean electronics and semiconductor sectors

The South Korean union field and the electronics exception

Under military rule, the South Korean state subordinated organized labor in 1961 to a single sanctioned federation, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU).Footnote 8 The Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987 created an independent democratic union movement, which in 1995 founded the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) as a militant alternative to the state-co-opted FKTU.Footnote 9 Korean unionism has offered two repertoires ever since.

The electronics industry diverged sharply from this trajectory. Electronics has ranked among the country’s largest exports since the 1980s, and semiconductors alone were its largest single export by 2025.Footnote 10 Yet unionization in this industry remained exceptionally low. In 2010, the Research Institute for Alternative Worker’s Movements estimated the union density at roughly one percent across the electronics sector, or only 0.18 percent excluding LG Electronics affiliates, compared with a national unionization rate of about twelve percent by 2019.Footnote 11

This sectoral weakness can be attributed to two structural conditions: production that firms can relocate in response to organizing, and a workforce vulnerable to employer control. Regarding the latter, factors like short job tenure, extensive subcontracting and indirect employment, and the gendered division of production made sustained workplace organizing difficult.Footnote 12

Samsung’s no-union doctrine and its sectoral peers

Structure is not the whole explanation. Scholars and civic groups have long identified a second and more decisive barrier: the “no-union management doctrine” of the Samsung chaebol, the industry’s flagship firm.Footnote 13

Samsung Electronics is the sector’s pivot. LG Electronics has had no semiconductor arm since the “Big Deal” restructuring that followed the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and Hynix, which emerged from it, makes no consumer electronics.Footnote 14 Samsung alone spans both.

Lee Kun-hee, Samsung chaebol’s second-generation heir, held that the no-union doctrine dated to the group’s founding in 1938.Footnote 15 Its enforcement continued: pro-company “paper unions” registered preemptively in 1988 and 2001, mobile-phone tracking of organizers in 2004, and, at Samsung Display Devices in 1998, the abduction of an employee who had protested layoffs.Footnote 16 The doctrine’s reach extended past the affiliates: subcontractors that organized were shut down.Footnote 17

Through the same decades, the most visible conflicts at the Samsung conglomerate were fought over occupational disease rather than wages or recognition, and they were carried by bereaved families, health professionals, and civic organizations rather than by unions. After Hwang Yu-mi, a semiconductor worker who died of leukemia in 2007 at twenty-two, more than a decade of campaigning led the reluctant company to acknowledge the problem and historically settle in November 2018, and moved the courts to judge such claims by social rather than strictly scientific standards.Footnote 18 The language of bodily harm at Samsung was civil society’s before it was any union’s.

Neither sectoral peer behaved as Samsung did. The union of Goldstar (a former body of LG Electronics) was founded in 1963 as a branch of the FKTU-era national metal union, decades before anything comparable at Samsung; after the militant disputes of 1987 and 1989, the firm moved from confrontation to an institutionalized partnership model, which treats the union as a cooperative partner rather than an adversary.Footnote 19 FKTU-published research, however, described the LG Electronics union’s model as subordinate cooperation confined largely to productivity.Footnote 20

SK Hynix likewise carries production unions organized at Icheon in August 1987, during the Great Workers’ Struggle, the nationwide wave of plant-level organizing that swept Korean heavy industry that summer, and at Cheongju in 1990.Footnote 21 The Icheon union withdrew from the Hyundai Group Trade Union Federation in 1992, stayed out of the 1993 affiliate solidarity struggle, and thereafter took an independent line it called pragmatist.Footnote 22 Accommodation at Hynix therefore dates from the mid-1990s, whereas at LG it had come with the disputes of 1987 and 1989. A KCTU-affiliated union followed only in 2018, among engineers and office staff rather than on the shop floor.Footnote 23 Both firms’ production unions belonged to the FKTU, the accommodationist federation.

LG’s and Hynix’s unions were built in the 1960s and 1980s, when their plants were labor-intensive and their bargaining units large, and both firms had four decades in which to convert an adversary into a partner. Samsung’s arrived after the semiconductor floor had already been rebuilt around automated handling, and into a workforce whose manufacturing headcount was falling.

By 2020, Samsung Group abandoned its no-union doctrine, but the unions had already taken root: the unions came first in February 2018, and the announcement followed. What the company gave up was the claim that no union could exist, not the objective of keeping unions weak, and what emerged was not one union but several, competing to speak for the same workforce. Those unions that emerged would find themselves among the unevenly automated production systems.Footnote 24

The rise of unions at Samsung Electronics, 2018–2023

Between 2018 and 2019, the first four unions were established at Samsung Electronics, formed without waiting on permission from above: NSEU brought its first bargaining demand weeks before Lee Jae-yong, Samsung chaebol’s third-generation heir, publicly ended the company’s decades-long no-union doctrine in May 2020,Footnote 25 coincident with his own bribery-case appeal.Footnote 26

Plural unions and the single bargaining channel

A clerical union, the first of its kind in SEC, was founded in February 2018, and then two more unions in August 2018: a union at the Gumi plant (later the Gumi Network Equipment Union) and Samsung Electronics Company Union (later also known as SECU Donghaeng). All three were unaffiliated with any national federation. In November 2019, NSEU was founded, the fourth union within SEC and the only one affiliated with a national federation, the FKTU.

The first three held thirteen inaugural members in total, against a workforce of more than 100,000, yet one of them could still become the representative bargaining union for the entire company:Footnote 27 Article 29-2 of the Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act (TULRAA) bases representative status on a majority of union members, not the workforce.Footnote 28

Recognition without bargaining power

Plural unions faced a statutory single bargaining channel requiring them to select a representative before bargaining with management. Because TULRAA did not specify how unions should unify the channel before bargaining began, SEC retained discretion over timing and procedure.Footnote 29 When NSEU demanded bargaining in 2020, the company delayed while continuing separate talks with the older unions; negotiations began only after a labor-ministry interpretation and those unions’ consent.Footnote 30 The company continued talking to the quieter, unaffiliated unions while stalling the one that had forced the issue.Footnote 31 The resulting Joint Bargaining Group signed SEC’s first collective agreement in July 2021, but wage negotiations soon stalled.Footnote 32

SEC management meanwhile continued setting wages through the statutory labor-management council, which KCTU critics described as bypassing collective bargaining.Footnote 33 Even a tentative wage agreement between unions and management in August 2022 accepted an increase already determined through the council. By 2022, no union had won a wage figure at the bargaining table.Footnote 34

Competing to represent the workforce

The single-channel requirement made the fifth union a competitor for representative status. In January 2023, workers in the consumer-oriented Device eXperience (DX) Division broke from NSEU, whose base lay in the semiconductor-side Device Solutions (DS) Division.Footnote 35 The split primarily reflected the divisions’ differing interests, although press accounts also portrayed the DX Union as representing younger workers dissatisfied with NSEU’s confrontational style and FKTU affiliation.Footnote 36

Through June 2023, NSEU claimed majority status and excluded DX from joint bargaining,Footnote 37 while DX contested NSEU’s membership count.Footnote 38 The labor commissions nevertheless awarded NSEU representative status in August 2023, giving it exclusive bargaining and strike rights for the members of all five unions.Footnote 39 In February 2024, DX joined three unions at other Samsung affiliates to form the Samsung Group United Union (SGUU).Footnote 40

NSEU’s representative status was time-limited, however. Under TULRAA’s enforcement decree, a representative union that concludes no agreement within a year loses the channel, after which another union may demand bargaining.Footnote 41 NSEU’s mandate therefore expired on August 4, 2024.Footnote 42

An automated production floor

The body of shop floor workers en masse that those plural unions competed to solely represent was shrinking, however. A Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU, an industrial union under the KCTU) and NSEU joint survey reported that the number of women manufacturing workers across Samsung’s operations, including overseas facilities, fell from 73,305 in 2017 to 22,908 in 2022. They attributed the decline to automation.Footnote 43

That automation, above all the automated handling of wafers, had not spread evenly. Because it was built into new production lines rather than retrofitted to fully depreciated older ones installed in the 1980s and 1990s, automation followed capital vintage: it was concentrated on newer lines processing 12-inch wafers, where the most valuable chips were made.Footnote 44 Older 8-inch lines producing mature-node chips (or “legacy” chips) remained markedly less automated through 2024, with workers still manually moving pods containing wafer lots, typically batches of twenty-five wafers.Footnote 45 A 2003 study reported that a front-opening unified pod (FOUP) containing one lot of twenty-five 12-inch wafers weighed approximately 9.0 kilograms (19.8 pounds), whereas a pod containing twenty-five 8-inch wafers weighed approximately 5.8 kilograms (12.8 pounds).Footnote 46 Workers consequently had less potential structural leverage on the newer lines, while the older lines remained more dependent on their labor.

Automation also redistributed occupational harm. On newer lines, automated equipment reduced regular operators’ direct chemical exposure but left residual risks disproportionately to outsourced maintenance technicians who opened equipment for servicing.Footnote 47 On older lines, SEC employees continued performing labor-intensive work. These lines therefore combined greater potential stoppage leverage with lower strategic value and greater musculoskeletal risk from manual wafer-lot handling. Those injuries would later support NSEU’s public occupational-health claims.

Which employees can a union represent? The AI era’s strike in 2024 and reweighting bodily harm

In June and July 2024, NSEU carried out the first strikes in Samsung Electronics’ fifty-five-year history: a one-day stoppage on June 7, followed by a three-day strike beginning July 8 that turned indefinite before ending on August 1. The union field was already split before the walkout. In late May, as wage talks collapsed, the SGUU, which the DX Union is part of, accused NSEU of colluding with KMWU under KCTU and of using the strike to expand KCTU organizing inside Samsung rather than to improve members’ conditions, branding the action as a company-harming act.Footnote 48 The DX Union had stood aside in April: only 36.8 percent of its members voted to decide whether to start industrial action.Footnote 49

Outside support came chiefly from the KCTU and KMWU, each issuing public statements on June 5 to back the strike.Footnote 50 Separately, the ICT steering committee of IndustriALL Global Union adopted a supporting statement on June 10 and 11.Footnote 51 NSEU’s own confederation, the FKTU, appeared only indirectly through the FKMTU’s seat on that committee, consistent with its more cooperative posture.

Divisions surrounding NSEU’s confrontation with Samsung Electronics management, both within and beyond SEC, only deepened. SECU Donghaeng, despite having voted to join the strike, reversed its position three weeks later. Amid divisions among the company’s unions and uneven worker participation, the question was whether NSEU could translate confrontation into bargaining leverage. The struggle in the summer of 2024 unfolded in two stages: first, an escalating attempt to halt production whose effects remained contested and which yielded no clear bargaining gain; and second, followed by the increased public prominence of an existing occupational health strategy that foregrounded injuries among workers on older, less-automated lines.

From legacy lines to AI chips: Escalation without leverage

On July 8, 2024, NSEU launched a three-day general strike. Its initial target reflected the uneven spread of automation examined in the previous section: the older, less automated lines appeared most vulnerable to a walkout.Footnote 52 The union’s demands centered on wages and compensation, including revision of a proposed 5.1 percent base-pay increase that union members had rejected and reform of Samsung’s Overall Performance Incentive scheme. The semiconductor division had received little performance pay for 2023, unlike the consumer electronics division.Footnote 53 Approximately 3,000 employees attended the first day’s rally. NSEU reported that 6,540 of its 30,657 members joined the strike, including 5,211 in equipment, manufacturing, and process-development roles.Footnote 54 Samsung’s Korea-based workforce in 2024 numbered roughly 125,000.Footnote 55

NSEU initially sought to disrupt production on the older 8-inch wafer foundry lines, which manufactured mature-node chips using 180-to-65-nanometer (nm) processes, which union officials argued could not operate without workers.Footnote 56 According to the union, Samsung Electronics had met steady demand for mature-node chips by adding labor to fully depreciated equipment rather than automating it.Footnote 57 This was the capital-vintage pattern in practice: the continued use of older equipment left the 8-inch lines more dependent on workers than Samsung’s newer production lines.

As public attention focused on potential output losses, Samsung management reallocated labor and deployed contingency staffing,Footnote 58 insisting that these measures would prevent any “critical disruption,” a claim echoed by the business press.Footnote 59 Korean law barred companies from hiring outside replacements for the strikers, so the company instead absorbed the walkout using its existing workforce.Footnote 60 Non-striking staff reported stress and minor localized slowdowns, while Samsung maintained through the third day that production remained stable.Footnote 61 NSEU rejected this account. Regardless of the level of automation, it argued, production could not continue without the people who managed the equipment and adjusted its parameters, and a stall in one process would block the next.Footnote 62 Public reporting could not resolve these competing claims: the company reported stable production, while the union reported disruption. Underlying the disagreement was whether the labor withdrawn by the strikers could be replaced internally or remained essential to production.

With participation declining and contested claims on disruption to production, NSEU escalated on July 10 by declaring an indefinite strike and shifting its target to the newer 12-inch silicon wafer fabs used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) production, typically operating at 10–4-nm process nodes.Footnote 63 This move brought the dispute into Samsung’s most sensitive segment. The company trailed SK Hynix and Micron in supplying HBM, a memory architecture that uses through-silicon vias to interconnect vertically stacked Dynamic Random-Access Memory dies, bonded into a single package. HBM carries data through the stack, enabling the high-speed data transfer required by graphical processing units used as AI accelerators. Samsung’s HBM products had also reportedly continued to fail Nvidia’s qualification tests.Footnote 64 The union argued that management’s misjudgments had squandered the opportunities presented by the AI boom while leaving workers’ pay unstable.Footnote 65

Targeting HBM, instead of resolving NSEU’s leverage problem, intensified public criticism. Business and IT commentators depicted the union as holding a national competitive asset hostage while Samsung sought its High Bandwidth Memory 3 Extended qualification from Nvidia,Footnote 66 and the government promoted the semiconductor industry.Footnote 67 Yet the backlash did not initiate declining participation: turnout was already falling by July 10 and reached only a few hundred by July 12.Footnote 68 Subsequently, on July 26, SECU Donghaeng told employees that confrontation had not produced a reasonable settlement and argued that the strike was dividing and harming workers.Footnote 69 The escalation strategy targeting HBM thus combined limited disruptive capacity in highly automated production with heightened political vulnerability.

The wage strike faced a parallel problem of public standing. Average annual pay at SEC was KRW 120 million (about USD 87,000), ranked among the top 4 percent of highest-paid workers in the country.Footnote 70 The conservative press had invoked that standing from the day the strike was declared, portraying the strikers as a privileged class rather than as vulnerable employees.Footnote 71

Downscaling confrontations and reweighting occupational health

Because SEC workers were portrayed as top earners, their wage claims struggled to be read publicly as a proper grievance, whereas workplace injury offered a more recognizable basis for claims. Seeking greater public legibility, NSEU gave greater weight during the strike’s second week to a strategy it had already developed: occupational health. On July 16, The Hankyoreh, a progressive daily, exclusively reported chronic musculoskeletal injuries of SEC employees, with the NSEU-presented photos showing deformed fingers, arthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome, among predominantly female workers on the 8-inch foundry lines.Footnote 72 In those older lines, wafer lots were still moved by hand rather than by the automated overhead hoist transport systems used on the newer 12-inch lines (Fig. 1). The older lines thus combined greater dependence on human labor with forms of bodily harm associated with manual handling. This shift redirected whom the union represented in public, from high-earning strikers toward workers injured on the oldest lines, and tapped into long-standing public concern over Samsung’s responsibility for occupational disease.

Figure 1.

An overhead hoist transport (OHT) system of the kind installed on Samsung’s newer 12-inch lines, shown here in a research setting at the KAIST Intelligent Manufacturing Laboratory.

An overhead hoist transport system with labeled components: OHT track, OHT vehicle and wafer lot.
Source: © 2022 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from Sangpyo Hong, Illhoe Hwang, and Young Jae Jang, “Practical q-learning based route-guidance and vehicle assignment for OHT systems in semiconductor fabs,” IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing 35, no. 3 (August 2022): 385–396, https://doi.org/10.1109/TSM.2022.3168702.

On August 1, 2024, three days before rival unions could initiate a challenge to its bargaining-representative status, NSEU announced the end of the strike. On August 5, with that status now open to challenge, the union signed a formal cooperation agreement with SHARPS, the occupational-health organization that had led the leukemia campaigns of the previous decade.Footnote 73 The partnership committed both organizations to joint action, including simplifying procedures for filing injury claims, developing prevention programs, and addressing clusters of musculoskeletal injury on legacy production lines.Footnote 74 The agreement formalized a working relationship that predated the strike: five months earlier, NSEU and the KMWU had published a 544-page occupational-health survey of Samsung’s affiliates, conducted by staff seconded from SHARPS and the Korea Institute of Labor Safety and Health.Footnote 75 The strike therefore reweighed an existing occupational-health strategy rather than creating a new one.

On August 8, Samsung announced lighter, easier-to-grip wafer boxes and a plan to raise logistics automation on Giheung’s Line 6 from approximately forty-four percent,Footnote 76 toward an eighty percent target.Footnote 77 Yonhap News Agency associated the redesign with photographs of finger deformation that NSEU had supplied to The Hankyoreh three weeks earlier.Footnote 78 These measures followed the disclosures without a negotiated settlement, whereas three weeks of strike action produced no comparable movement on the union’s central wage demand: November’s tentative agreement retained the 5.1 percent increase that union members had rejected before the 2024 strike, when the union was seeking 6.5 percent. Samsung also filed criminal complaints against three union officers in August and September.Footnote 79 The company thus responded differently to the health disclosures and to the wage and production-based demands, while the evidence does not establish that the campaign alone caused them.

After ending the strike, NSEU shifted to less costly tactics: a protest outside Lee Jae-yong’s residence,Footnote 80 work-to-rule through the refusal of holiday, night, and overtime work, and the documentation of unfair labor practices.Footnote 81 Its adversarial stance also strained relations with the FKTU and its metal federation, the FKMTU. Although NSEU considered affiliating with the FKTU’s rival KCTU, it remained within the FKTU while drawing closer to the occupational-health movement.Footnote 82

NSEU’s production stoppages yielded no clear bargaining gain, and their effects remained contested. Occupational health offered a more publicly legible claim, supported by civil-society research and advocacy that predated the strike. Samsung’s measures followed the health disclosures. In 2025, conflict over internal union democracy raised a different question: not how workers’ claims became legible to the public, but whom the union represented and to whom it answered among its own members.

An intra-union democracy crisis, 2024–2025

The strike’s limited bargaining gains turned the problem of representation inward. Members rejected the union executive committee’s late-2024 tentative agreement; in 2025, disclosure of separate pay terms for seven union officers transformed dissatisfaction with bargaining outcomes into a crisis of internal democracy.

A rejected tentative agreement and no-confidence vote

NSEU lost its status as the representative bargaining union on August 29, 2024, and the right to strike with it, when the clerical union demanded bargaining. That union had announced a merger with NSEU on August 5, but the two unions had not legally completed it. NSEU’s executive maintained that the bargaining demand had been discussed in advance.Footnote 83 NSEU regained representative status on October 3 and returned to the bargaining table.Footnote 84 On November 14, after ten months of negotiation, the executive committee reached a tentative agreement covering the combined 2023 and 2024 wage rounds: a 5.1 percent base-pay increase plus two million FamilyNet points worth about USD 1,420 and redeemable against company products.Footnote 85

Members rejected the agreement. In the ratification vote held from November 14 through 21, 58.64 percent voted against it, with a turnout of seventy-five percent.Footnote 86 Two grievances reportedly drove the rejection: the 5.1 percent increase was too low to justify what the strike had cost members, and the FamilyNet points would go to all employees, meaning that members who had struck and forgone months of wages would receive the same benefit as those who had not.Footnote 87

The rejection forced the leadership to answer to the membership. The union held a general confidence vote on the executive committee from November 29 through December 6. The committee survived: sixty-two percent voted confidence, while thirty-eight percent supported its resignation.Footnote 88 Wage bargaining carried over into 2025 as a single three-year package covering 2023–2025, and a leadership that more than a third of participating members had asked to resign returned to the bargaining table.

A side agreement and the discipline of internal critics

On February 24, 2025, Samsung Electronics and NSEU reached a tentative wage and collective agreement, centered on an average wage increase of 5.1 percent. This time, members accepted the agreement: Nearly eighty-eight percent of the votes cast favored the agreement, which was formally signed on March 5.Footnote 89 Publicly, the settlement appeared to stabilize labor-management relations after months of confrontation.

That appearance soon collapsed. Alongside the agreement ratified by members, the executive board had separately agreed with management to a higher pay increase for the union’s seven full-time officers, reportedly 6.2 percent, compared with 5.1 percent for members, without disclosing the terms to the membership.Footnote 90 In mid-March, Han Ki-bak, head of NSEU’s Giheung branch, and six other delegates, including Woo Ha-kyung, challenged the side agreement through the union’s own communication channels.Footnote 91 The executive board did not deny its existence, maintaining that the higher rate was permitted under the collective agreement and intended to help “recruit a new executive board.”Footnote 92 Members, however, had not been given the chance to judge the arrangement for themselves.

The side agreement also reflected how Samsung’s union strategy had changed by stages. For decades, the company had sought to keep unions out. Once unions took root in the late 2010s and Samsung formally abandoned its no-union doctrine in 2020, management instead confronted them through the institutions of recognized labor relations. It delayed the bargaining process, continued to set wages through the labor-management council, and redeployed existing personnel during the 2024 strike. After the strike, it filed criminal complaints against three union officers over their entries to company plants. In 2025, management concluded a separate agreement with the executive board over pay for its own seven full-time officers. These episodes do not establish a single, coordinated strategy to weaken unions. Taken together, however, they demonstrate continuing managerial efforts to contain union activity and still show that the end of the no-union doctrine did not end conflict over the terms on which union representation operated inside SEC.

The executive board responded to the disclosures by disciplining its internal critics. On April 24, the union’s disciplinary committee expelled Han and Woo, barring them from union office, and sanctioned two other delegates.Footnote 93 The committee characterized their criticism as “anti-union activity.”Footnote 94

Han and Woo responded through statements published on the SHARPS website on April 29, claiming that the disciplinary action punished them for criticizing the side agreement rather than for conduct that had harmed the union.Footnote 95 The same day, NSEU demanded that SHARPS remove the statements from its website.Footnote 96 Han and Woo appealed the disciplinary decision on May 3 and 4.Footnote 97 The KMWU, which had supported the NSEU-led 2024 strike, initially remained silent.

When NSEU reconsidered the disciplinary decision on May 15, after SHARPS publicly pressed it to intervene,Footnote 98 the KMWU criticized both the side agreement and the disciplinary action as inconsistent with democratic unionism. NSEU rejected the criticism and upheld the penalties.Footnote 99 Meanwhile, membership fell from approximately 36,000 in March to 30,891 by late May, a loss of nearly one member in seven.Footnote 100 The figures do not establish that this controversy alone caused the decline, but the contraction underscored the scale of the union’s internal crisis.

Judicial intervention and conditional renewal

On May 22, Han and Woo filed suit in the Suwon District Court seeking to invalidate their expulsions and sought injunctions,Footnote 101 backed by forty-one civil organizations, including SHARPS.Footnote 102 The executive committee subsequently apologized in late May, shortened its term by six months to end in September 2025,Footnote 103 and resigned en masse on June 4.Footnote 104 Woo’s disciplinary penalty was revoked on June 26.Footnote 105

On July 3, the Suwon District Court granted Han’s injunction and suspended his expulsion pending a decision in the underlying suit.Footnote 106 The court held that expulsion, the union’s severest sanction, could be invalidated when markedly excessive or objectively unreasonable. It found grounds for a possible abuse of disciplinary discretion: the board appeared to have singled out the leading figures of internal opposition to the side agreement.Footnote 107 Provisional though it was, the ruling lent judicial weight to the internal critics’ objections and suggested that the leadership’s attempt to silence dissent may have violated basic norms of internal democracy.

The ruling cleared Han to stand in the union election, and in late August the union members elected him with Woo Ha-kyung and Lee Yun-kyung, by the narrow margin of 50.48 percent to 49.52 percent. They took office in September as chair, senior vice chair, and secretary general, respectively. All three were in their thirties and came from the DS semiconductor division.Footnote 108

The victory did not itself restore the union’s internal legitimacy. Han said after the election that substantive negotiations could not begin until the union had met with its members and restored their trust. To rebuild bargaining power, the new leadership would seek coordination with the other unions at SEC. Its first substantive demand was the abolition of the existing performance-bonus system.Footnote 109

One concrete change on occupational health nevertheless came amid the broader crisis in 2025. On February 12, Woo published a first-person account in The Labor Today, writing as a manufacturing worker in Giheung. She described the roughly five-kilogram run boxes (about eleven pounds) that workers lifted shift after shift and the resulting damage to their bodies, with her shoutout, “We are not components.” Her testimony extended beyond the manual handling required in her own job. Equipment engineers, she wrote, put their hands into chambers that remained above 400 degrees Celsius (approximately 750 degrees Fahrenheit) to repair faults without waiting for equipment to cool, in order to save wafers.Footnote 110 Automation had moved the hand from the people who ran the equipment to the people who repaired the automated equipment. On April 2, the joint labor-management task force announced a redesigned run box that would be twenty-two percent lighter.Footnote 111 Three weeks later, the union expelled her over the dispute surrounding the side agreement, not over her occupational-health testimony.

That public visibility did not translate automatically into legal recognition. Earlier leukemia cases had proceeded under workers’ compensation law, and Korean courts had resolved scientific uncertainty in workers’ favor.Footnote 112 Musculoskeletal injury, the kind that comes from lifting and repetition, falls under a different law, which asks no such question. The labor ministry keeps a list of eleven kinds of task that count as burdensome work, each with a number attached: so many kilograms, so many lifts, so many hours a day.Footnote 113 A job is on the list or it is not. The list had not changed since January 2020. In April 2025, a jointly commissioned assessment across SEC management and unions reported that no legally defined burden work had been identified on the company’s production line.Footnote 114 The union had made workers’ injuries publicly recognizable, but those injuries did not fit the applicable legal category.

Capital vintage shaped workers’ potential leverage, but actual disruption also depended on participation, interunion divisions, management’s redeployment of personnel, and tactical choices; the strike’s production effects remained contested. Occupational injury offered a more publicly legible claim, aided by civil-society advocacy that predated the union. Yet wages remained central to internal representation: the 2025 crisis arose from an undisclosed agreement over officers’ pay, while the incoming leadership returned to the performance-bonus system. Public legibility could not substitute for accountability to members.

Conclusion

Samsung’s 2024 strike revealed an uneven distribution of labor power within a single firm. Older, less-automated lines depended more heavily on workers but produced less strategically valuable chips; newer lines produced HBM but were more automated. This capital vintage pattern created potential leverage without guaranteeing disruption, whose extent remained contested. When the strike produced no clear bargaining gain, NSEU gave greater weight to occupational health, drawing on a civil-society language of bodily harm already recognizable at Samsung. Yet public recognition did not ensure legal recognition under the administrative definition of burdensome work. Nor did public legibility establish representative legitimacy: the governance crisis of 2025 showed that legitimacy remained dependent on the union’s members and could be withdrawn from within.

This case offers two contributions to labor history. First, the case speaks to the literature on worker power and automation together. A tightly connected production system can give workers greater potential leverage where production remains dependent on their labor, and at Samsung, the newer the plant, the less human labor remained. The case also speaks to the history of automation: its effects on workers’ power did not require a managerial plan to weaken them, but followed from where the company built its newest capacity. Second, to the scholarship on symbolic politics: the language of bodily harm is not only a tool for workers with no structural position. Workers at the technical center of the industry needed it too. At Samsung Electronics, the health register was available because earlier struggles outside the company had made occupational injury legible as a claim against the company. The 2025 crisis raised a separate question: whether the union retained representative legitimacy among its own members.

Capital vintage may help explain why workers in different parts of the same firm, or in firms with differently aged production systems, possess different forms and degrees of potential leverage. The labor consequences of AI have been debated largely at the point of use, in clerical, professional, and creative work, while the blue-collar workers who manufacture AI’s material foundation remain comparatively underexamined. The relationship between leverage, public legibility, and internal legitimacy may likewise vary across industries in which workers seek to make less visible forms of harm politically consequential. Capital vintage thus offers a way to examine how differences in the age and automation of production systems shape the uneven distribution of labor power within and across firms.

Acknowledgements

I warmly thank Theodore Kim, Sangwoon Yoo, two anonymous ILWCH referees, and the special issue editors, Aaron Benanav and Susannah Glickman, for their valuable comments and advice. I also thank three anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Science & Technology Studies, published by the Korean Association of Science and Technology Studies, for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to the students in my Spring 2025 Yale College course, “Decentering Computer Science: Transpacific Computing History across the United States, East Asia, and Beyond,” particularly Aden Gonzales, for their engagement with and feedback on material that became part of this article.

The author used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5 (September–December 2025, during initial drafting), Claude Opus 4.8 (June–July 2026, during revision), and OpenAI ChatGPT GPT-5.6 Sol (August–September 2026, during the second revision), accessed through the web interface at claude.ai and chatgpt.com, respectively, in four ways: as an editorial interlocutor, to test the argument’s structure and identify weak, circular, or unsupported steps; to audit the revised manuscript against the coeditor’s and reviewers’ stated requirements; to check the manuscript’s factual claims against a separately maintained record of verified sources; and to produce English renderings of Korean-language sources, including proper nouns and technical terms. In revision the tool also proposed replacement sentences, compressions, and cuts, which the author reviewed and accepted, edited, or rejected. All first full drafts were written by the author, and all analytic ideas and arguments originated with the author. Translations of primary sources and summaries of secondary literature produced in these exchanges were checked against the original texts. Claims that could not be verified against an identified source were not carried into the manuscript. The author is responsible for the accuracy of all content, including all references.

Competing interests

The author declares none.

References

Notes

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Figure 0

Figure 1. An overhead hoist transport (OHT) system of the kind installed on Samsung’s newer 12-inch lines, shown here in a research setting at the KAIST Intelligent Manufacturing Laboratory.

Source: © 2022 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from Sangpyo Hong, Illhoe Hwang, and Young Jae Jang, “Practical q-learning based route-guidance and vehicle assignment for OHT systems in semiconductor fabs,” IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing 35, no. 3 (August 2022): 385–396, https://doi.org/10.1109/TSM.2022.3168702.