A wave of "N percent bonus" strikes that began at Samsung Electronics is spreading. The unrest has moved beyond traditionally union-heavy industrial companies to reach the IT sector, which had long kept its distance from labor militancy.
The bonus dispute is widely seen as the main driver of labor-management conflict this year. A string of record-breaking earnings reports across industries — not just semiconductors — has raised workers' expectations. Pro-union legislation and policy signals from the political sphere have added fuel, leaving much of the public with heightened expectations of getting their share.
As the economy evolves into a 21st-century AI era, the focus of labor disputes has shifted to a new paradigm: the "N percent bonus." One-time wage hikes and job-security pledges have been pushed to the back burner.
Yet in some quarters, the old habit of striking for striking's sake is repeating itself. The case in point is Kakao, which has signaled what would be the company's first-ever strike. Even as negotiations between labor and management have proceeded through multiple channels, the union has raised the issue of compensation for former executives who have already left the company.
At one point, the two sides appeared to be converging on a rough figure — operating profit at N percent — and there was hope a strike could be avoided. But the union kept adding demands at the table: job guarantees in response to the company's affiliate restructuring, and calls to revise executive compensation, with the names of former chief executives cited explicitly.
In the process, two other stakeholders — shareholders and consumers — have been sidelined. The planned action is only a four-hour partial strike, but consumers who rely on KakaoTalk to send money, shop and confirm appointments are anxious. Given that some users suffered real losses during a past Kakao outage, that anxiety cannot be dismissed as unfounded.
Kakao's roughly 1.77 million shareholders as of the end of last year are even more frustrated. While AI-driven rallies have sent rival tech stocks surging several times over, Kakao — one of South Korea's flagship IT companies — has been drifting toward its 52-week low. The primary blame lies with the company's failure to demonstrate tangible results in the AI transformation era, but a labor-management standoff consuming energy that should go toward restructuring and innovation has clearly added to shareholders' pain.
The union's moves — holding a strike authorization vote on the first mediation date and filing a rally notice on the second — read like a textbook blitz from "The Art of War": strike fast, keep the pressure on, extract maximum concessions and build momentum toward a full walkout. Along the way, the Kakao dispute has drifted well beyond its core issues of pay and benefits, morphing into a broader battle tied to its parent federation, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' Federation of Korean Chemical, Fiber, Food and Allied Industries Workers' Unions. The banner under the Kakao union's flag — reading "KCTU FKCF Kakao Branch (Crew Union)" — is a telling sign of how far the conflict has traveled from its origins.
The Samsung Electronics union, which came close to a full strike, recently saw more than 18,000 members resign and lost its majority status — even after securing compensation packages of up to 600 million won (about $430,000) per worker. That outcome reflects a failure to read the MZ generation, whose defining traits include pragmatism, a demand for fair rewards and a rejection of the solidarity-strike culture of an older union era. Consumers and shareholders — the other stakeholders in this story — can only hope that Kakao's union does not repeat the same mistake.
By Choi Jeong-ho, editor
choijh@heraldcorp.com
