The Deadline Has Passed
May 15, 2:00 PM. The deadline set by the Samsung Electronics union for CEO Jeon Yeong-hyun at 10:00 AM has passed. As of this moment, no response from Jeon has been reported. Silence is a response in itself. Samsung Electronics did not respond to the demand for the CEO to personally answer three core demands: transparency in performance bonuses, removal of the ceiling, and institutionalization. The countdown to the general strike on the 21st now stops for nothing.
What deserves attention here is the tactic of the deadline itself. The union is no longer in a position to request negotiations from management. It is in a position to unilaterally set the conditions for negotiations and forewarn the consequences of non-compliance. This is a concrete sign that the structural power of the bottleneck has changed the workers' negotiation stance. This time last year, the Samsung union was an organization that regarded even sitting at the bargaining table as a victory in struggle. Now it has evolved into an organization that simultaneously rejects mediation proposals from management and the National Labor Relations Commission, and sends an ultimatum to the CEO. This change over 12 months did not occur because workers' consciousness changed first. It became possible because they systematically recognized the strategic position of the production process they stand in. The fact that even a few days' halt of the HBM line would shake the global AI supply chain is not a rhetorical slogan but a physical reality, and workers are now learning to turn that reality into their negotiating weapon.
Was Samsung management's ignoring of the deadline a mistake or a calculation? Probably both. The mistake was underestimating the union's seriousness; the calculation is betting on the government's emergency mediation card. Deputy Prime Minister Koo Yun-cheol's statement that it "must never happen," Minister Kim Min-seok's convening of an emergency ministerial meeting, the National Labor Relations Commission's repeated mediation attempts—the state has already made clear which side it is on. But even if the emergency mediation power is invoked to ban strikes for 30 days, that only buys time, not resolves the contradiction. If after 30 days the OPI ceiling remains and the performance bonus criteria are still opaque, the workers will return with greater anger. As already seen at Samsung Biologics, the end of a strike is not the end of struggle but a tactical shift to lawful protest.
Meanwhile, in Beijing yesterday, Trump and Xi Jinping held 135-minute talks. The agenda: tariffs, Iran, Taiwan, AI. As reported by CNBC and Reuters, both sides agreed to selectively ease tariffs to recalibrate the trade war to a manageable level rather than end it. Xi Jinping publicly warned that the Taiwan issue could jeopardize U.S.-China relations. All of this follows the familiar pattern of imperialist negotiations. But what is decisively different this time are the figures aboard Trump's plane: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Apple's Tim Cook, and Tesla's Elon Musk. Those accompanying the U.S. president to China negotiations are neither diplomats nor security advisors, but the heads of monopoly capital in AI, smartphones, and electric vehicles. Never has the fusion of state and monopoly capital been displayed so vividly. What was traded on the Beijing table were not abstract national interests, but export conditions for AI accelerator chips, restructuring of the rare earth supply chain, and access to the electric vehicle market. All these deals ultimately converge on the question of who extracts surplus value and where.
Let us overlay the two scenes. In Beijing, imperialist powers negotiate the conditions for dividing surplus value in the AI era. In Suwon, Hwaseong, and Pyeongtaek, the workers who physically produce that surplus value are issuing an ultimatum to the corporation. This is more than mere simultaneity. The workers on Samsung Electronics' HBM lines are demanding a change in the distribution of the surplus value they produce. And the HBM they produce is precisely the object the U.S. and China, seated at the Beijing table, are trying to seize from and defend against each other. Where workers' struggle touches the core material basis of imperialist competition, domestic class contradiction and international imperialist contradiction form the same circuit. The Samsung Electronics workers' demand for performance bonuses is not simply a wage struggle; it is the first organizational assertion of the objective position of the Korean working class in the global AI supply chain.
As of 10:00 AM today, labor-management relations at Samsung Electronics have entered a new phase. No longer negotiation but confrontation. With Jeon Yeong-hyun having failed to respond, the ball is entirely in the workers' court. Six days until the 21st. This time is preparation time. Management will prepare emergency mediation and a public relations offensive; workers will increase the organizational completeness of the strike. Both sides know that this strike is not an extension of simple wage negotiations, but the first full-scale test of the structural power of semiconductor workers within Korea's chaebol-monopoly capitalist system. Even at the moment Trump and Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing, the maintenance worker on the Pyeongtaek HBM line knows where the chips in that hand are made.
What deserves attention here is the tactic of the deadline itself. The union is no longer in a position to request negotiations from management. It is in a position to unilaterally set the conditions for negotiations and forewarn the consequences of non-compliance. This is a concrete sign that the structural power of the bottleneck has changed the workers' negotiation stance. This time last year, the Samsung union was an organization that regarded even sitting at the bargaining table as a victory in struggle. Now it has evolved into an organization that simultaneously rejects mediation proposals from management and the National Labor Relations Commission, and sends an ultimatum to the CEO. This change over 12 months did not occur because workers' consciousness changed first. It became possible because they systematically recognized the strategic position of the production process they stand in. The fact that even a few days' halt of the HBM line would shake the global AI supply chain is not a rhetorical slogan but a physical reality, and workers are now learning to turn that reality into their negotiating weapon.
Was Samsung management's ignoring of the deadline a mistake or a calculation? Probably both. The mistake was underestimating the union's seriousness; the calculation is betting on the government's emergency mediation card. Deputy Prime Minister Koo Yun-cheol's statement that it "must never happen," Minister Kim Min-seok's convening of an emergency ministerial meeting, the National Labor Relations Commission's repeated mediation attempts—the state has already made clear which side it is on. But even if the emergency mediation power is invoked to ban strikes for 30 days, that only buys time, not resolves the contradiction. If after 30 days the OPI ceiling remains and the performance bonus criteria are still opaque, the workers will return with greater anger. As already seen at Samsung Biologics, the end of a strike is not the end of struggle but a tactical shift to lawful protest.
Meanwhile, in Beijing yesterday, Trump and Xi Jinping held 135-minute talks. The agenda: tariffs, Iran, Taiwan, AI. As reported by CNBC and Reuters, both sides agreed to selectively ease tariffs to recalibrate the trade war to a manageable level rather than end it. Xi Jinping publicly warned that the Taiwan issue could jeopardize U.S.-China relations. All of this follows the familiar pattern of imperialist negotiations. But what is decisively different this time are the figures aboard Trump's plane: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, Apple's Tim Cook, and Tesla's Elon Musk. Those accompanying the U.S. president to China negotiations are neither diplomats nor security advisors, but the heads of monopoly capital in AI, smartphones, and electric vehicles. Never has the fusion of state and monopoly capital been displayed so vividly. What was traded on the Beijing table were not abstract national interests, but export conditions for AI accelerator chips, restructuring of the rare earth supply chain, and access to the electric vehicle market. All these deals ultimately converge on the question of who extracts surplus value and where.
Let us overlay the two scenes. In Beijing, imperialist powers negotiate the conditions for dividing surplus value in the AI era. In Suwon, Hwaseong, and Pyeongtaek, the workers who physically produce that surplus value are issuing an ultimatum to the corporation. This is more than mere simultaneity. The workers on Samsung Electronics' HBM lines are demanding a change in the distribution of the surplus value they produce. And the HBM they produce is precisely the object the U.S. and China, seated at the Beijing table, are trying to seize from and defend against each other. Where workers' struggle touches the core material basis of imperialist competition, domestic class contradiction and international imperialist contradiction form the same circuit. The Samsung Electronics workers' demand for performance bonuses is not simply a wage struggle; it is the first organizational assertion of the objective position of the Korean working class in the global AI supply chain.
As of 10:00 AM today, labor-management relations at Samsung Electronics have entered a new phase. No longer negotiation but confrontation. With Jeon Yeong-hyun having failed to respond, the ball is entirely in the workers' court. Six days until the 21st. This time is preparation time. Management will prepare emergency mediation and a public relations offensive; workers will increase the organizational completeness of the strike. Both sides know that this strike is not an extension of simple wage negotiations, but the first full-scale test of the structural power of semiconductor workers within Korea's chaebol-monopoly capitalist system. Even at the moment Trump and Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing, the maintenance worker on the Pyeongtaek HBM line knows where the chips in that hand are made.