The Name of the Chain and the Soil Beneath
In this segment, a visitor asked about the classification of semiconductor clusters. Yongsan, Pyeongtaek, Icheon, Seongnam Pangyo, Daegu, Gumi, and Busan are all called semiconductor clusters, but what exactly is different? The question was that system semiconductors, foundries, memory, DRAM, and fabless were all jumbled in their mind. I stated firmly that this confusion did not come from the visitor's ignorance. It is because the Korean government and media lump four completely different things under the single term 'semiconductor cluster.' I laid out the order. Fabless only designs and has no factory, foundries manufacture others' designs on consignment, IDMs do both design and manufacturing, and memory is a standardized storage device. System semiconductor is a category, and foundry is a business model within it. I said that using "system semiconductor (foundry)" as a combined term is itself a category error. And I distinguished the characteristics by region. Pangyo is a design cluster without fabs, Pyeongtaek and Hwaseong are Samsung's directly operated cutting-edge mass production, Yongin is a future complex plan, Icheon and Cheongju are SK Hynix memory, and Gumi and Daegu are back-end processes, mature processes, and materials and components. The visitor kept digging. What is fabless, what is EDA, and at the end he said this. The general public doesn't know how the world works through this, it's too difficult.
That last sentence was the real question of this segment. I answered that he was half right and half wrong. Transistor layout, PDK lock-in, and exposure wavelength are indeed difficult. But what he doesn't know is not technology. It is who sells semiconductors to whom and who profits. And what makes him not know that is not the complexity of technology but the class arrangement of information. I drew a table. You can live without knowing the 3-nanometer transistor structure, how PDK lock-in works, or the principles of EUV exposure. But if you don't know who received the Yongin compensation money, how much the Pyeongtaek subcontract workers are paid, where the excess profits from semiconductor exports go, and why this country joins the US blockade against China, you become politically powerless. And the system makes the right look like the left. It says that since the technology is difficult and citizens cannot judge, leave it to the experts. This is a tactic repeated in nuclear power, finance, and health care. If you ask who pays the experts' salaries, the structure is revealed. This conversation itself is a good example. The visitor grasped the hierarchy of the chain by himself with just a few questions. The one line he got at the end is this. The US sets the rules, Taiwan and the Netherlands hold the tools, Korea and Japan manufacture beneath them, and the profits are shared by domestic chaebols and US capital. Is this one line difficult? No. What is difficult is preventing this one line from being said.
But this abstract hierarchy is not only on paper. At the same time, in the Yongin semiconductor cluster, a much more material deadlock was taking place. With mass production just one year away, core infrastructure is blocked by administrative procedures and compensation friction. The expansion of Local Road 318, the key access road to SK Hynix's Yongin fab, has been halted for months due to delays in land compensation negotiations and residents' complaints, and if this road is not opened, the import of trillions of won worth of precision equipment scheduled for early next year will itself be blocked. The dedicated water pipeline drawing 47 kilometers from Paldang Dam is not being started all at once but sequentially from sections where permits are completed, so civic groups in Gwangju City, through which 27 kilometers of the pipeline passes, have come forward demanding measures for traffic and environmental damage. The ultra-high-voltage transmission network is worse. Of the 75 cases of 345-kilovolt transmission lines that must be completed by 2030, about 70 percent, or 53 cases, have not even begun construction, and residents in seven cities and counties including Yeoju, where 130 transmission towers pass, demand undergrounding and alternative routes citing electromagnetic waves and property rights infringement. The industry says that while major countries worldwide settle infrastructure around fabs under state leadership, Korea has built only factory buildings and cannot connect roads and water pipelines on time, risking the inability to run fabs. And they demand a special exception for blanket approval of permits that can be applied immediately.
What I need to see here is not the technical content of the deadlock but the class arrangement of the deadlock. What capital demands is the swift conclusion of land compensation, blanket approval of water and power permits, and the neutralization of residents' opposition. In other words, it is a demand to strip away the people's claims and procedural rights under the name of 'special exception.' But reading this deadlock only as capital's delay is half the story. The people living where roads, transmission towers, and water pipelines pass pay the cost of those facilities with their bodies and property. The compensation negotiations are difficult not because the residents are stubborn, but because the price they pay is not being properly calculated. Therefore, this scene is not a matter of chaebols' cost increase. The fact that those at the top of the chain set the rules, and that in the place where the physical infrastructure of those rules is laid, a single road not being opened prevents trillions of won worth of equipment from entering, paradoxically proves that at no link in the chain do the people have decision-making power. The saying that semiconductors are a 'national strategic industry' means that it has not been decided who pays the cost of that strategy and who takes the profits. Returning that decision to the people is what must be asked in this phase. Not only the subcontract workers on the fab lines but also the Yeoju residents standing in front of the transmission towers and the Gwangju citizens through whose land the water pipeline passes stand before the same question. For whom, and by whose decision, are these facilities being built?
And this chain does not extend only upward. Below, labor was moving again. The Samsung Biologics Win-Win Labor Union reorganized its bargaining tactics in this segment. Following the revised proposal on June 17, it compressed demands to 18 for the second time, and while integrating clauses that the company had opposed as infringing on personnel and management rights into five, it lowered the level from 'agreement' to 'consultation' and information sharing and implementation monitoring. Article 36 calls for a labor-management joint committee with equal numbers to monitor the implementation of CEO commitments to be held once a quarter, and Article 37 includes prior consultation and prohibition of forced retirement in cases of organizational restructuring, personnel reassignment, voluntary retirement, and honorary retirement. Article 38 prohibits restricting welfare benefits on grounds of low performance ratings, and Article 39 prohibits forcing mandatory distribution ratios or allocated numbers for low performance grades such as NI and requires sharing promotion rates and high performance ratings with the union. Article 40 deals with securing appropriate staffing and improving overtime and shift burdens. The union said that if these five clauses are faithfully reflected, it will withdraw all remaining demands on personnel and management rights. The third post-adjustment on October 1 is the watershed. At the same time, at POSCO, the 120-hour second partial strike ended, and from the 22nd, along with the executive election, negotiations and strikes entered a truce until the 2nd of next month. The first strike was the first in 58 years since the company's founding. It was the result of a standoff between a 7.1 percent base pay increase proposal and the company's 2 percent proposal. And Philip Morris Korea signed a wage agreement and withdrew its strike plan.
The axis that binds these three scenes into one is not wages but authority. Among the 18 demands of the Samsung Bio union, the real issue was not the wage increase rate but how far workers can intervene in personnel evaluation and workforce reassignment. Those clauses that the company calls infringement of personnel rights are precisely the issue of decision-making authority hidden under the name of management rights. Who decides the lower allocation of evaluation grades, who gets pushed to another position through organizational restructuring, who decides the targets and criteria for voluntary retirement. As long as all of this remains the exclusive right of capital, a few percentage points in wage increase is merely a number layered on top. The union's lowering the level from agreement to consultation is not a retreat of demands but a revelation of the real issue. What refuses even consultation is the substance of management rights. Abstraction cannot move people. The visitor grasped the hierarchy of fabless, EDA, and foundry with a few questions, the union nailed the mandatory distribution ratio of evaluation grades in a single clause, the Yeoju residents stood in front of the transmission tower route — this is where the name of the chain and the soil beneath meet. What must be asked in this phase is not what name to attach to which cluster. It is who holds the authority to attach that name, lay roads on it, and make people work beneath it.
That last sentence was the real question of this segment. I answered that he was half right and half wrong. Transistor layout, PDK lock-in, and exposure wavelength are indeed difficult. But what he doesn't know is not technology. It is who sells semiconductors to whom and who profits. And what makes him not know that is not the complexity of technology but the class arrangement of information. I drew a table. You can live without knowing the 3-nanometer transistor structure, how PDK lock-in works, or the principles of EUV exposure. But if you don't know who received the Yongin compensation money, how much the Pyeongtaek subcontract workers are paid, where the excess profits from semiconductor exports go, and why this country joins the US blockade against China, you become politically powerless. And the system makes the right look like the left. It says that since the technology is difficult and citizens cannot judge, leave it to the experts. This is a tactic repeated in nuclear power, finance, and health care. If you ask who pays the experts' salaries, the structure is revealed. This conversation itself is a good example. The visitor grasped the hierarchy of the chain by himself with just a few questions. The one line he got at the end is this. The US sets the rules, Taiwan and the Netherlands hold the tools, Korea and Japan manufacture beneath them, and the profits are shared by domestic chaebols and US capital. Is this one line difficult? No. What is difficult is preventing this one line from being said.
But this abstract hierarchy is not only on paper. At the same time, in the Yongin semiconductor cluster, a much more material deadlock was taking place. With mass production just one year away, core infrastructure is blocked by administrative procedures and compensation friction. The expansion of Local Road 318, the key access road to SK Hynix's Yongin fab, has been halted for months due to delays in land compensation negotiations and residents' complaints, and if this road is not opened, the import of trillions of won worth of precision equipment scheduled for early next year will itself be blocked. The dedicated water pipeline drawing 47 kilometers from Paldang Dam is not being started all at once but sequentially from sections where permits are completed, so civic groups in Gwangju City, through which 27 kilometers of the pipeline passes, have come forward demanding measures for traffic and environmental damage. The ultra-high-voltage transmission network is worse. Of the 75 cases of 345-kilovolt transmission lines that must be completed by 2030, about 70 percent, or 53 cases, have not even begun construction, and residents in seven cities and counties including Yeoju, where 130 transmission towers pass, demand undergrounding and alternative routes citing electromagnetic waves and property rights infringement. The industry says that while major countries worldwide settle infrastructure around fabs under state leadership, Korea has built only factory buildings and cannot connect roads and water pipelines on time, risking the inability to run fabs. And they demand a special exception for blanket approval of permits that can be applied immediately.
What I need to see here is not the technical content of the deadlock but the class arrangement of the deadlock. What capital demands is the swift conclusion of land compensation, blanket approval of water and power permits, and the neutralization of residents' opposition. In other words, it is a demand to strip away the people's claims and procedural rights under the name of 'special exception.' But reading this deadlock only as capital's delay is half the story. The people living where roads, transmission towers, and water pipelines pass pay the cost of those facilities with their bodies and property. The compensation negotiations are difficult not because the residents are stubborn, but because the price they pay is not being properly calculated. Therefore, this scene is not a matter of chaebols' cost increase. The fact that those at the top of the chain set the rules, and that in the place where the physical infrastructure of those rules is laid, a single road not being opened prevents trillions of won worth of equipment from entering, paradoxically proves that at no link in the chain do the people have decision-making power. The saying that semiconductors are a 'national strategic industry' means that it has not been decided who pays the cost of that strategy and who takes the profits. Returning that decision to the people is what must be asked in this phase. Not only the subcontract workers on the fab lines but also the Yeoju residents standing in front of the transmission towers and the Gwangju citizens through whose land the water pipeline passes stand before the same question. For whom, and by whose decision, are these facilities being built?
And this chain does not extend only upward. Below, labor was moving again. The Samsung Biologics Win-Win Labor Union reorganized its bargaining tactics in this segment. Following the revised proposal on June 17, it compressed demands to 18 for the second time, and while integrating clauses that the company had opposed as infringing on personnel and management rights into five, it lowered the level from 'agreement' to 'consultation' and information sharing and implementation monitoring. Article 36 calls for a labor-management joint committee with equal numbers to monitor the implementation of CEO commitments to be held once a quarter, and Article 37 includes prior consultation and prohibition of forced retirement in cases of organizational restructuring, personnel reassignment, voluntary retirement, and honorary retirement. Article 38 prohibits restricting welfare benefits on grounds of low performance ratings, and Article 39 prohibits forcing mandatory distribution ratios or allocated numbers for low performance grades such as NI and requires sharing promotion rates and high performance ratings with the union. Article 40 deals with securing appropriate staffing and improving overtime and shift burdens. The union said that if these five clauses are faithfully reflected, it will withdraw all remaining demands on personnel and management rights. The third post-adjustment on October 1 is the watershed. At the same time, at POSCO, the 120-hour second partial strike ended, and from the 22nd, along with the executive election, negotiations and strikes entered a truce until the 2nd of next month. The first strike was the first in 58 years since the company's founding. It was the result of a standoff between a 7.1 percent base pay increase proposal and the company's 2 percent proposal. And Philip Morris Korea signed a wage agreement and withdrew its strike plan.
The axis that binds these three scenes into one is not wages but authority. Among the 18 demands of the Samsung Bio union, the real issue was not the wage increase rate but how far workers can intervene in personnel evaluation and workforce reassignment. Those clauses that the company calls infringement of personnel rights are precisely the issue of decision-making authority hidden under the name of management rights. Who decides the lower allocation of evaluation grades, who gets pushed to another position through organizational restructuring, who decides the targets and criteria for voluntary retirement. As long as all of this remains the exclusive right of capital, a few percentage points in wage increase is merely a number layered on top. The union's lowering the level from agreement to consultation is not a retreat of demands but a revelation of the real issue. What refuses even consultation is the substance of management rights. Abstraction cannot move people. The visitor grasped the hierarchy of fabless, EDA, and foundry with a few questions, the union nailed the mandatory distribution ratio of evaluation grades in a single clause, the Yeoju residents stood in front of the transmission tower route — this is where the name of the chain and the soil beneath meet. What must be asked in this phase is not what name to attach to which cluster. It is who holds the authority to attach that name, lay roads on it, and make people work beneath it.