Town hall meeting planned for October
to be chaired by President Roh Tae-moon
Samsung Electronics plans to hold a direct dialogue session next month with all employees in its DX (Device eXperience) division, which oversees home appliances, smartphones and televisions.
According to industry sources, Samsung Electronics is planning a town hall meeting in October to be chaired by Roh Tae-moon, the company's co-CEO and head of the DX division.
The company shared the plan at a closed-door briefing on business conditions held for select managers and team leaders.
DX division employees have raised complaints over the widening incentive gap with the DS (Device Solutions) division, which handles the semiconductor business, as well as the company's emergency management posture following a deterioration in earnings and a company-wide push toward AI transformation.
In response, the company appears to have concluded that a forum is needed where Roh and senior executives can directly address employee concerns and explain plans to improve earnings and strengthen competitiveness.
The Samsung Electronics labor union Donghaeng — made up primarily of DX division workers — has been staging an indefinite sit-in protest outside the Seoul home of Samsung Group Chairman Lee Jae-yong in Yongsan-gu, following earlier demonstrations at the Suwon campus and the Seocho office. The union has criticized what it calls an excessive compensation gap with the DS division, and noted that executives received long-term performance incentives of up to tens of billions of won even as overall earnings declined.
The union has also called for the creation of a company-wide shared compensation pool that would allow the semiconductor and finished-product businesses to offset each other's cyclical downturns over the long term.
The company, however, has repeatedly emphasized its principle of keeping DS and DX funding pools separate, and has said it intends to compete on technological strength even as profitability has been squeezed by rising memory chip prices.
Meanwhile, attention is also focused on whether the meeting will produce an apology and a plan to prevent a recurrence of the so-called "union blacklist" incident involving members of the Samsung chapter of the cross-company labor union. Earlier, union officials including Chairman Choi Seung-ho were referred to prosecutors on charges of compiling and sharing a document containing the names, employee identification numbers and union membership status of roughly 100,000 Samsung Electronics employees.
hss@heraldcorp.com
