SUWON, May 20 — Samsung Electronics' union said it would suspend a strike set to begin tomorrow after the two sides reached a tentative pay deal, potentially averting action that threatened to disrupt the production of artificial intelligence (AI) and other chips.
It suspended the planned 18 days of strike action by nearly 48,000 of its members to put the tentative agreement to a vote.
Speaking to the media, union leader Choi Seung-ho said the vote will take place from May 22 to May 27. An earlier notice posted on the union's website said it would take place from May 23 to May 28.
In a separate statement, Samsung Electronics said that the two parties had reached a tentative agreement on wages and collective bargaining and pledged to "build mature and constructive labour-management relations."
The 11th-hour deal came after days of talks that broke down multiple times, including earlier today when the union announced that it would go ahead with the strike. Talks restarted later in the day after Labour Minister Kim Young-hoon stepped in to mediate.
Reuters previously reported that the two sides had been at odds over how performance bonuses would be distributed between the conglomerate's hugely profitable memory business and loss-making logic chip businesses.
Choi said they had agreed on how to distribute profit to loss-making businesses and would publish details of the tentative plan on the union's website shortly. He expects the union members to approve the wage deal.
"We will do our utmost to stabilise labour-management relations at Samsung Electronics going forward," Choi said.
Samsung accounts for almost a quarter of South Korea's exports and is also the world's largest memory chip maker, so production disruptions risk fuelling price rises at a time when the AI boom has caused shortages.
