Labor unions at Samsung Electronics ratified a wage agreement on Wednesday, securing hefty bonuses for workers in its chip division, which has been raking in record profits thanks to the artificial intelligence boom.
But some workers in another division of Samsung, which makes phones and TVs, said the deal overlooked their interests, in a sign of the disparities of the A.I. era.
Last week, Samsung agreed to commit 10.5 percent of its annual operating profit over the next 10 years to employee bonuses, and remove caps on individual bonus amounts, provided it clears some profitability targets.
The vote ends a monthslong dispute between Samsung and its workers over the distribution of its substantial A.I. profits, one that was brought to a provisional agreement only after government negotiators intervened the night before a planned walkout last week. It represents a major win for workers at a company that has long maintained an anti-union stance, and only began negotiating with them in 2021.
“There were some regrettable aspects of the wage negotiation process but it was nonetheless a meaningful agreement,” said Choi Seung-ho, the head of the Samsung Electronics Labor Union, which, as the largest of the company’s three unions, led the negotiations.
Nearly three-fourths of about 62,000 workers who voted said they were in favor of the deal, according to S.E.L.U.
The deal has also averted a potential crisis in the global A.I. supply chain, which relies heavily on South Korean memory chips.
Samsung Electronics, along with fellow South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, has been profiting handsomely from A.I.’s voracious appetite for memory chips, which store and retrieve data and are critical for working with large data sets. In the past year, Samsung Electronics shares have increased fivefold in value.
As global prices for the chips continue to rise amid a supply crunch, some analysts have forecast that Samsung Electronics’ operating profit this year will hit a staggering $200 billion — seven times what it was last year.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for more than 60 percent of global memory chip production. Last year, workers at SK Hynix negotiated their own bonuses to reflect the company’s A.I.-driven profits.
As the global A.I. expansion continues apace, Samsung’s workers have argued in recent months that they should be given their due share of a greatly enlarged pie. The message especially resonated with workers in the semiconductor division, who make up the majority of S.E.L.U.’s members.
If the company were to hit $200 billion in operating profit this year, semiconductor workers — particularly those in the crown jewel memory unit — could receive bonuses of up to around $430,000, a spokesman for Samsung said. The average monthly wage in South Korea last year was around $2,800, according to government data.
But a smaller union associated with workers in the consumer electronics division — which boycotted the negotiations and whose 15,000 members were excluded from the vote — accused the lead union of neglecting their interests, and decried the deal as “discriminatory.” Under the agreement, workers in the consumer electronics division are expected to get payouts that are a fraction of those of their semiconductor division peers.
In the first quarter of this year, 94 percent of Samsung’s operating profit came from semiconductor sales. During the negotiations, the company had argued that “rewards should follow performance.”
Although an attempt by the smaller union to block the negotiations with a court injunction was unsuccessful, it has that said it would seek to nullify the results with additional legal action, arguing that its exclusion from the vote was unfair.
“We are not coveting rewards based on performance,” Park Jay-yong, the leader of that union, told reporters Tuesday. “We are only saying that those under the same roof should be treated fairly and reasonably.”
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