SEOUL, May 22 (Xinhua) -- Samsung Electronics workers began voting Friday on a tentative wage agreement for 2026, amid growing tensions over a sharp gap in performance bonuses between the company's business divisions, according to Yonhap News Agency.
About 89,000 union members are eligible to vote on the tentative agreement, with balloting set to continue until 10 a.m. on May 27. The agreement will be approved if a majority of eligible union members participate in the vote and more than half vote in favor.
Under the tentative agreement reached on Wednesday, Samsung Electronics management and labor agreed to introduce a special bonus pool for the device solutions (DS) semiconductor division funded by 10.5 percent of business performance, raise average wages by 6.2 percent and establish a housing loan program.
Of the pool, 40 percent would be distributed as a division-wide bonus, while the remaining 60 percent would be allocated based on the performance of individual business units.
Opposition has been mounting among employees in the device experience (DX) division, which oversees smartphones, home appliances and TVs, as weak earnings are expected to leave them with far smaller bonuses than semiconductor workers.
Membership in a DX-focused labor union reportedly surged from about 2,600 to more than 12,000 within a day as employees joined the union ahead of the vote.
Samsung Electronics' largest union said members of the DX-focused union would be excluded from the official vote because the union had withdrawn from the joint bargaining group before the tentative deal was reached. The DX-focused union, however, plans to hold its own vote among members. ■