SEOUL, May 22 (Reuters) – Some 89,000 unionised Samsung Electronics’ workers in South Korea will begin voting on Friday on a pay deal that has been hailed as a win for the company as well as its memory chip workers.
Voting, which is being conducted electronically, will begin at 2:12 p.m. after a brief delay due to a server overload, the union said. The vote is due to run until 10:00 a.m. on May 27.
The union’s leader has said he expects the agreement to be ratified.
Approval requires a simple majority to vote in favour and a majority of all unionised members to take part. Otherwise negotiations must restart from scratch.
The 11th-hour government-mediated deal reached on Wednesday averted a threatened 18-day strike that risked inflicting significant pain on South Korea’s economy and denting global chip supply.
It resulted in an 8.5% surge in Samsung’s share price on Thursday to a record high. The stock briefly hit a fresh record on Friday before giving up some ground to be last trading down 2.3%.
Under the deal, all Samsung chip workers will receive 50% of their annual salary as a regular bonus in cash, according to the union. On top of that, Samsung will set aside 10.5% of the chip division’s operating profit for special bonuses which will take the form of stock.
Some of its memory chip workers are set to receive total bonuses of about $416,000 this year.
(Reporting by Kyu-seok Shim and Heekyong Yang; Editing by Ed Davies and Edwina Gibbs)
