Iron struck Samsung, this time something went wrong.
1
Workers strike en masse
In 2021, South Korea's most powerful company, Samsung, is on fire.
Moon Jae-in took office, park Geun-hye was caught in the bureau that year, but also left a tail that was not cut clean; you and the chaebol you came and went for four years, and finally cut a three-star knife.
Samsung's "crown prince" Lee Jae-yong was arrested in court on January 18 last year on charges of bribery in the "Park Geun-hye cronies interfering in politics case" and sentenced to two years and six months in prison.
As a result, after only 207 days of serving his sentence, he was released on parole.
The real "banknote ability" is unlimited, the momentum of the chaebol is enough to shake the national law, and the style of the domineering president is no less than that of the dog blood plot.
Blessings are incomparable, and misfortunes are not alone.
Not long after the heat of parole passed, Samsung employees began to make "moths" again.
On February 7, news came out of South Korea:
South Korea's Samsung Electronics is on the verge of its first worker strike in 53 years as payroll talks with the company's unions broke down.
To put it simply: employees collectively asked for a salary increase, and the company did not agree, so the collective strike was such a thing.
In the past few months, the union has held 15 rounds of negotiations with Samsung, but no progress has been made.
The Samsung union demanded an increase in the annual salary of each employee by 10 million won (about 53,000 yuan) and a performance bonus equivalent to 25% of the group's operating profit.
For this appeal, Samsung management is a word, a punctuation mark does not agree.
The salary increase they offered was a 4.5 percent increase in base salary and a 3 percent increase in performance bonuses in 2021, a far cry from what employees want.
So the talks broke down and the union issued an ultimatum to give Samsung 10 days to reach an agreement; strike if it didn't comply, and suspend several of Samsung's businesses, such as semiconductor chips and electronics.
Of course, there are also people who hold different views, believing that this matter is not simple:
The Samsung Union doesn't necessarily have that much energy. Behind the incident and the previous U.S. port union let workers strike, resulting in the near stagnation of U.S. and global freight, and then the global supply chain is tight, and the artificial shortage of materials is a routine and a script. Samsung is the world's largest chip supplier, once the strike stop production will affect the global IT high-tech industry, manufacturing a new round of material (chip) shortage, triggering greater global turmoil.
2
Why is Samsung so "tough"
Employees are on strike, and it is not difficult to say that the solution is actually not difficult - a salary increase is enough, even if it does not meet the high demands of the union, it should not be difficult to do subtraction on the original conditions and come up with a plan that both sides can compromise.
But after 15 negotiations, the management did not make a compromise, and finally made a collective strike, which is really a bit puzzling.
On the other hand, LG next door, which is also a leading electronics company in South Korea, has also recently made trouble with employees asking for a raise.
LG paid performance bonuses to employees last month, and after employee protests, the company raised the bonus amount more than originally planned, and eventually things were calmed down without a bigger, worse impact.
And Samsung is particularly iron this time: want a salary increase? No! Don't even think about it!
The reason why Samsung dares to be so tough on the employees below is that a large part of it comes from its own confidence, that is, Samsung's own hard power.
"A Korean can't do three things in his life, namely death, taxes and Samsung."
South Korea, one of the most heavily involved countries on the surface, is constantly competing from birth.
After more than twenty years of rolling, a small number of "king of roll kings" were born, and their lives were only two ways - either to learn and excel and enter the "system" of South Korea; or to work for Samsung.
About 84 years ago, Lee Byung-zhe, who had failed many times, founded a company called Samsung in Daegu City, southeast of the Korean Peninsula.
In Korean, the word "three" means "big, many, strong", while the word "star" has the meaning of clear and bright and eternal light.
Samsung first started out as a border trade business, selling korean vegetables and dried fish and other commodities to northeast China, realizing the primitive accumulation of capital.
People at that time would never have imagined that this small trading company would control the economic lifeblood of the Republic of Korea decades later.
In 1948, Samsung & Co. was founded, it was the third year after the end of World War II, the Korean Peninsula was in the post-war recovery phase, Samsung imported many post-war necessities into the country, the business grew rapidly, and a year later became the seventh in the industry. Three years later, net worth has grown 20-fold.
In 1953, Samsung Sugar Mills was established, the first large sugar enterprise in South Korea; three years later, it occupied more than 90% of the domestic market share.
In 1954, Samsung First Woolen Co., Ltd. was established, and by 1960, the capital of First Woolen Was increased from the initial 100 million won to 3 billion won, a 30-fold explosion in six years.
In 1968, Li Bingzhe announced at the New Year's Day conference that Samsung would enter the high-tech industry next.
In 1969, Samsung Electronics was founded. Eight years later, the first batch of color televisions independently developed by Samsung began to be exported to Panama and other countries.
In 1983, the construction of the first production line of the semiconductor factory began.
In 1988, Samsung's first mobile phone, the SH-100, was officially released; ten years later, it became one of the top ten companies with the largest number of patent registrations.
In 2012, South Korea's Samsung surpassed Nokia in one fell swoop and became the global mobile phone overlord in terms of quantity.
To this day, Samsung has penetrated into all aspects of South Korea's society and economy, everywhere.
It does everything, no dead ends, electronics, semiconductors, construction engineering, shipbuilding, finance, insurance, biopharmaceuticals, chemical industry, medical, aviation parts, clothing, hotels, automobiles...
Born in Samsung Hospital, the crib was imported to South Korea by an ocean freighter built by Samsung Heavy Industries;
Buy insurance from Samsung Life Insurance;
Living in an apartment built by Samsung Engineering & Construction;
Wearing clothing from Samsung Textiles subsidiaries;
Sick, Samsung has hospitals and pharmaceuticals;
Look at the news, Samsung has a media group;
For business trips, Samsung has hotels, and most of the transportation facilities are built by Samsung;
Life, not to mention, Samsung phones and appliances in every corner of life.
Samsung's annual turnover accounts for more than 15% of South Korea's GDP!
Speaking of this, everyone understands why it dares to be so tough and say that there will be no salary increase without a raise - except for working for me, you have almost no better solution!
Moreover, the employment situation in South Korea is not good now, among the 50 million people, the unemployed population is more than one million, and the unemployment rate of 15 to 29 years old is more than 27%, which does not include temporary workers.
If you leave Samsung because you don't have a salary increase, it will be the ordinary employees who will eventually suffer losses.
3
Anti-chaebol, anti-monopoly
South Korean chaebols were born in the Vietnam War – 20 years from 1955 to 1975.
The front war needs artillery shells, the generals need grain and grass, and the United States needs military production bases; so South Korea is chosen as the front line supply production site.
In order to concentrate resources on doing big things, South Korea fully supports five enterprises (Samsung, Hyundai, LG, SK, Lotte), vigorously develop military production, and the five enterprises have become bigger, which is the origin of the five major chaebols in South Korea.
After the five major chaebols in South Korea have become larger, they have controlled most of the industries, making the economy more and more monopolistic and concentrated, and the lives of young people are getting worse and worse, and South Korea has now become one of the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the world.
In fact, let alone the ordinary people in South Korea, under this social structure, even the President of South Korea has become a "high-risk occupation", and none of them have a good end.
South Korean chaebols not only reject free competition with strong market dominance, but also try to avoid competition between different chaebols. With the exception of a few sectors directly controlled by the South Korean government, chaebols control almost all important industrial sectors.
Like Samsung, it is even more awesome, from the womb to school, from marriage to funeral, a dragon is all in control.
Small companies have little room to live, and Koreans rarely start their own businesses.
As an ordinary person, to enter a company like Samsung in South Korea is really as Ma Yun said: it is a blessing for Xiulai; there is no better employment option.
As the saying goes, the big deceit of the store, the big business of the three-star family, not only to make the big deceitful, but also to the small two in the store must also do their best to exploit the ability. The so-called commanding heights of the labor supply market have no scruples.
It is enough to see that this strike has nothing to do with the global semiconductor industry chain and the science and technology war between what countries, and the problem lies in South Korea's chaebol monopoly system, which is not solved, and similar things and more serious things will only emerge in an endless stream.
So is South Korea's problem really with the chaebols?
In the ignorance, the chaebol is the result, not the cause; it is the appearance, not the essence.
What Koreans need to oppose is not the chaebol, but the high monopoly brought about by the centralized layout of the industry.
The typical case is the mobile phone, in the country only domestic mobile phones have Huawei, Xiaomi, Meizu, ZTE, OPPO, vivo and so on, but South Korea now only has a Samsung.
It is true that the high degree of monopoly in the market is also an important factor for Korean companies to go bigger and stronger in the world, and it is precisely because of this that the production capacity is always in the hands of a small number of people.
However, a rational and stable structure of social power distribution should be that those who hold more productive forces have more power.
South Korea is the opposite.
Throughout South Korea's history, you will find that its awakening of national consciousness is definitely at the forefront of the East Asian countries – under the leadership of the church and trade unions, it has formed a strong cohesive force, the people's sense of struggle is no less than in our revolutionary years, and the demonstrations have hardly been interrupted in the past forty years.
From a distance, hundreds of thousands of people sat in the streets of Seoul in the past few years and successfully pulled down Park Geun-hye, an ally of the chaebol and a rightist tycoon. Now Moon Jae-in's war against the chaebols also has deep public support behind it.
Even so, it still fails to fundamentally change the pattern of social power distribution, but why?
Many people wonder if there is a beautiful country to obstruct from it? Is U.S. Wall Street capital moving from it?
I think that even if there is, it is still not the key; or as mentioned above, the anti-chaebol does not break the industrial monopoly pattern, and it is inevitable that the bamboo basket will be empty.
If you destroy a three-star, you will also produce four stars, five stars, six stars, and there is no end.
No matter how awakened the people at the bottom of South Korea and their tradition of resistance, in the end they still lack rights and interests, and the struggle for decades has not been able to solve the problem from the root, as if "scratching the itch in the boots"; this is caused by excessively concentrated productive forces.
All economic problems are political; all political problems are ultimately economic problems.
Therefore, to fight for rights and interests, we should not start from other places, but should start from anti-monopoly and first add more subjects to this market.
When market competition is more sufficient and more subjects grasp the productive forces, many problems can be solved by themselves.