South Korea's technology industry, as well as the country's economy, are breathing a sigh of relief after representatives of Samsung Electronics workers and the company reached an initial agreement to avert a planned 18-day strike, which would have seriously affected national production.
The negotiations, in which the government itself had to intervene as a mediator, centred on demanding significant pay rises for all the company's workers, after employees in the chips and semiconductors division (who are manufacturing components directly for AI centres and generating billions for Samsung) managed to secure a huge bonus package for themselves.
The rest of Samsung's workforce, nearly 90,000 employees, have an online vote open from now until 27 May to choose the demands they will present to the company to request pay rises, although these will not be as substantial as those secured by the chip division. Some of these bonuses, according to Reuters, amount to around $410,000 for this year alone.
The AI boom and the component shortage are not only affecting the production of chips and memory for the consumer market: virtually the entire global economy currently depends on these components continuing to arrive, and now the workers know they can exert very real pressure on their bosses.