Samsung Electronics employees begin voting on pay deal

Seoul (ANTARA) - Samsung Electronics employees began voting on Friday (22 May) to decide on the matter of the provisional pay agreement for 2026, amid rising tensions triggered by a sharp gap in performance bonuses among the company’s business divisions, according to Yonhap News Agency. About 89,000 union members are eligible to cast their votes in deciding the provisional pay deal, with voting scheduled to continue until 27 May at 10:00 a.m. local time. The pay deal will be approved if a majority of eligible union members vote in the process and more than half of them vote in favour. Under the provisional agreement reached on Wednesday (20 May), management and the Samsung Electronics union agreed to introduce a special bonus fund for the Device Solution (DS) semiconductor division, funded at 10.5 percent of business performance, raising average wages by 6.2 percent, and establishing a housing loan programme. Of the total fund, 40 percent will be distributed as a bonus to all divisions, while the remaining 60 percent will be allocated based on the performance of each business unit. Opposition to the deal has been increasing among employees in the Device Experience (DX) division, which oversees smartphones, home appliances and televisions, as weaker earnings are expected to leave them receiving a much smaller bonus than workers in the semiconductor division. DX-focused union membership has reportedly jumped from around 2,600 to more than 12,000 in a day after workers joined the union ahead of the voting day. Samsung Electronics’ largest union said that members of the DX-focused union would be excluded from the formal vote, given that the union had withdrawn from the joint negotiating group before the provisional agreement was reached. However, the DX-focused union plans to hold its own vote among its members.