
Some capitalists can only "share hardship," but are unwilling to "share prosperity."
Author:Sleepy
AI may redefine the future, but it cannot yet replace the dignity that belongs to labor.
... On May 20th, wage negotiations between Samsung Electronics and the labor union nearly broke down. The union had planned an 18-day strike starting May 21st. At the last minute, a temporary agreement was reached, temporarily suspending the strike, with the next step to be decided by a vote of union members. But the real problem did not disappear. Strikes are not unfamiliar to us. Those past events are equally heavy; some occurred in old industrial bases, some in the automotive supply chain, and some in export factories sustained by cheap labor. The key words are always low wages and unpaid wages. Initially, people were taken for granted as durable consumables, placed within various plans called "the big picture." Until life became unbearably oppressive, people suddenly realized they hadn't degenerated into mere cogs in a machine. They straightened up from that cold, rigid order, making a human sound. But this time was different. This time, it was the workers of Samsung Electronics who stepped forward. They weren't the workers trapped in the tide of globalization, but rather a group at the very core of the AI supply chain, closest to the "future." Within the massive conglomerate of Samsung, this giant controlling the global semiconductor industry, was being put on pause by its own workers. A strike jeopardizing global AI is precisely targeting the lifeline of the global AI supply chain. Samsung and SK Hynix together produce approximately two-thirds of the world's memory chips. While memory chips have always been important, they weren't exactly a lucrative business. However, with the advent of AI, they have suddenly become a battleground. Large-scale model training, inference, and data center expansion require more than just GPUs; data must be fed in, stored, and retrieved at high speeds, necessitating high-bandwidth storage such as HBM (High-bandwidth memory). According to KB Securities analyst Jeff Kim, the 18-day strike could disrupt 3% to 4% of global DRAM supply and 2% to 3% of NAND supply. While not apocalyptic, it's enough to put price expectations, customer production schedules, cloud provider costs, and tech stocks on edge. The South Korean government is even more uneasy. Because Samsung is not an ordinary company; it's more like a showcase of South Korea's national power. Yonhap News Agency reported that semiconductor exports account for about 35% of South Korea's total exports. In the first quarter of 2026, South Korea's exports reached a record high of $219.9 billion, with semiconductor exports increasing by 139% year-on-year to $78.5 billion. Samsung itself accounts for about a quarter of the market capitalization of South Korea's KOSPI. In other words, a tremor in Samsung's production line affects not only one company's profit statement, but also South Korea's exports, stock market, exchange rate expectations, and the country's confidence in telling its story to the world. More importantly, AI arrived too suddenly. In the past, when South Korea talked about becoming a technological powerhouse, it focused on mobile phones, panels, automobiles, home appliances, and semiconductors. Now, the global narrative has been reshaped by large-scale models, with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, a group of large-scale model companies from China, and computing power giants like Nvidia standing in the spotlight. South Korea certainly wants to develop its own sovereign AI, and the government is promoting national-level AI infrastructure. Nvidia has even announced plans to deploy over 260,000 AI chips in South Korea. However, South Korea is well aware that relying solely on models will make it difficult to gain overwhelming international influence amidst the competition between the US and China. What it truly holds onto is the harder, heavier, and less appealing path: memory chips, HBM, DRAM, NAND, advanced manufacturing, and the underlying supply chain that feeds AI data centers. This is why Samsung is more important than ever before. The further AI advances, the more the world realizes that large models aren't magic floating in the clouds; they require electricity, GPUs, and memory. South Korea may not be able to change the world with a single model, but it can make its chips indispensable to models worldwide. The AI industry usually talks about computing power, models, the power struggles between giants, and who has outmaneuvered whom. The Samsung strike suddenly brought everyone back down to earth. No matter how high the computing power, it ultimately comes down to factories, shifts, bonus formulas, and labor negotiations. The future isn't floating in the clouds. The future will also involve paying wages. Why did they strike? The union's core demands are as follows: A 7% increase in basic wages; Allocating 15% of Samsung's annual operating profit to an employee bonus pool; Removing the current bonus cap of approximately 50% of annual salary, and clearly specifying how bonuses are calculated, when they are paid, and whether they will continue to be included in future bonuses. Samsung disagrees. The company believed the union's demands were excessive, especially since extending high bonuses to loss-making business units would break the rule of "whoever makes money gets more bonuses." According to reports, a key point of contention in the final mediation was the issue of profit sharing between different business units within the semiconductor division. With the storage business profitable while other businesses were under pressure or even losing money, should large bonuses be given to employees in loss-making departments? In modern large companies, ordinary employees are increasingly less likely to discuss money directly with their bosses. The money was crammed into a bunch of seemingly objective things: performance, coefficients, costs, cycles, business units, profit calculations, and bonus caps. Samsung's bonuses have always been tied to a complex formula, with Korean media repeatedly mentioning the term EVA. Essentially, profits are calculated by first deducting taxes, investments, and various capital costs; only what's left is considered a bonus. The financial logic is sound, but it's hard for people to accept. Employees don't understand: if company profits are increasing, why isn't my bonus changing? Did I lose because of poor performance, or because of this formula? Does the sweat I shed count as a contribution in the company's eyes? The anger of Samsung employees has been building up until today because of a mirror standing next to them: SK Hynix. SK Hynix has secured a prime position in the AI storage field and shone brightly in the HBM supply chain. More importantly, it knows how to capitalize on this success, translating it into tangible results on employees' paychecks. In September 2025, SK Hynix reached a new agreement with its labor union: for the next ten years, the company would allocate 10% of its annual operating profit to employees, and the previous bonus cap was removed. The JoongAng Ilbo reported at the time that, under the new agreement, each employee was expected to receive approximately 100 million won in bonuses that year, equivalent to about 450,000 RMB. By early 2026, the Seoul Economic Daily reported, based on the company's 2025 performance, that SK Hynix's approximately 34,500 employees would receive performance bonuses averaging about 140 million won, or about 630,000 RMB. Even more outrageous, the Seoul Economic Daily cited FnGuide's prediction that SK Hynix's operating profit in 2026 could reach 230.0885 trillion won, with 10% being a bonus pool of approximately 23 trillion won. Dividing this by 34,549 employees, the average bonus per person would be about 670 million won, or about 3.04 million RMB. The competition is already fierce. At this point, Samsung employees will naturally be annoyed when the company talks about EVA, capital costs, and departmental differences. Samsung's official financial report shows that in the first quarter of 2026, the company's consolidated revenue reached 133.9 trillion won, a record high for a single quarter; operating profit reached 57.2 trillion won. The semiconductor division's revenue in the first quarter was 81.7 trillion won, with an operating profit of 53.7 trillion won. The profits mainly came from AI-related demand, such as high-value-added AI storage, rising industry storage prices, HBM4, and the expansion of AI data centers. The awkward thing about this is precisely this: When the company is losing money, people have no leverage. The boss advises everyone to be patient, saying the cycle will eventually turn around. The employees may not be convinced, but since they don't see any profit on the books, they just let it go. Once the company is financially secure again, and the lucrative opportunities are already on the table, it's no longer possible to fool people with emotional appeals. Who gets to eat, who sits at the head of the table, and who can only stand by and smell the aroma? The root of the problem lies elsewhere. To understand why Samsung has angered its employees so much today, we can't just look at a payslip; we need to look back at the long-standing tension between South Korean conglomerates and workers. South Korea's modernization process is more like a forced march led by the state. Large companies are dragged along at the forefront, while workers follow blindly. This train certainly runs incredibly fast, but the allocation of seats is never decided by sitting down and discussing it. Post-war South Korea was impoverished. From the Park Chung-hee era onward, the state became the overall coordinator of industrialization, heavily supporting conglomerates to secure orders, build factories, and catch up with technology. Samsung, Hyundai, SK—these names gradually became the face of the nation. They were pre-determined to be the standard-bearers that had to win, because South Korea needed that victory. For this, the state surrendered resources, banks surrendered loans, and society surrendered endless patience; in the factories, only ironclad discipline remained. In this system, the role of the workers was clear: first build up the nation, first make the company big, first endure. Wages could be delayed, rights could be delayed, unions could be delayed, and dignity could be discounted. Before the train even started moving, don't ask if the seats are comfortable. 1987 was a watershed year. The monolithic order cracked, and workers emerged from the factories. Unions began to take root in large corporations, and workers were no longer willing to be merely a vague backdrop in grand narratives of the "economic miracle." They stepped into the limelight, demanding wages, safety, and, more importantly, to be treated as living, breathing creators, not just worn-out parts to be discarded. But Samsung was long an exception. Samsung's "non-union management" was a long-standing part of its corporate culture. In 2019, Samsung executives and employees intervened in and obstructed legitimate union activities in various ways, leading to the imprisonment of Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Sang-hoon for disrupting union activities. In 2020, Lee Jae-yong publicly apologized and promised to abolish this old practice within the Samsung Group, finally causing a crack in Samsung's iron curtain. Therefore, this strike is not abrupt. Behind it lies South Korea's post-war industrialization, the old methods of the chaebols, the labor movements after 1987, Samsung's long tradition of not having a union, and the belated apology in 2020. The most hurtful aspect of the whole affair is not the money, but that some capitalists can only "share the hardship" but are unwilling to "share the prosperity." When companies face difficulties, employees are often told to act like family. When the company is profitable, employees are reminded that it's a company. The former emphasizes camaraderie, the latter emphasizes rules and regulations. The problem is, people don't only show emotion during difficult times. At this point, it's no longer just a Korean story. "Overcoming difficulties together," "reducing costs and increasing efficiency," "improving quality and efficiency," "embracing AI," "enhancing human efficiency," "optimizing costs"—these are phrases we're all too familiar with now. This might be the most unseemly aspect of the AI era. We thought AI would liberate people from labor. The result is often that people have to cooperate with AI to save the company money; people have to learn AI to make departments more efficient; people have to accept job reshuffling, performance reassessment, and salary re-evaluation. As for bonuses, there will always be people advising you to wait, not to rush, that the company still needs to invest, conduct R&D, withstand economic cycles, and maintain competitiveness. These reasons may be true. But the problem is, if they only focus on one direction, they become a set of respectable excuses. Many companies in reality often act this way: money is earned by everyone, but when discussing how to divide it, you'd better not interrupt. Samsung workers are now interrupting. But their interruption doesn't necessarily mean they'll win. The South Korean government may use emergency mediation, the courts have already restricted some actions, and Samsung has complex production and legal tools. A semiconductor factory isn't a small workshop that can be shut down at will, and a union can't stop such a sophisticated system without cost. The real world isn't a wish-fulfillment story; workers don't achieve victory so easily. In Bong Joon-ho's *Snowpiercer*, humanity is crammed into a train that can't stop. The engine represents order, technology, and the future; the rear represents overcrowding, silence, and a predetermined fate. The most poignant aspect of this story isn't the forced classification of the carriages, but rather the shared premise: the train must never stop. As long as the train keeps moving forward, the hardships you endure in which carriage, and whether you're eating cockroaches, all become "necessary costs" for maintaining the system's operation. For that grand driving force, individual lives seem always willing to be sacrificed. Samsung's strike is similarly trapped in a train that "cannot stop." Wafers cannot be damaged, production lines cannot be halted, AI servers cannot wait, South Korea's export data cannot decline, and global tech companies don't want to see memory chip prices pushed up further. Every reason is irrefutable and irrefutable. From the perspective of the national economy, Samsung cannot stop; in the face of the global supply chain's accounts, Samsung cannot stop; in the undecided AI race, Samsung absolutely cannot stop. The more a machine is required to keep running, the more people inside are expected to endure. Endure the production line, endure the cycle, endure performance targets, endure company strategy, endure global competition. In the end, people find they are always making way for something bigger—from the company itself to the industry, to the future. Ordinary people's lives seem small in the face of these grand concepts, as small as a screw. But even a screw experiences metal fatigue. The Samsung union's actions this time did not overturn the benefits AI brings to the world, nor did they negate the semiconductor industry, nor did they say that technological progress is unimportant. It's not an old story of the poor rebelling against the rich, nor is it a small tale of high-paid employees receiving larger bonuses. It actually touches upon one of the most unsettling questions of the AI era: As technology becomes increasingly advanced, will labor become increasingly silent? As machines become increasingly massive, is the bargaining power of ordinary people destined to shrink? As growth becomes increasingly dazzling, will the certainty of our lives become increasingly weaker? We like to talk about the future, and the word "future" is indeed useful. It's like a high-wattage spotlight, always illuminating the blueprints at press conferences, the ambitions in financing plans, and the pulsating market capitalization of companies. But the future can't just illuminate the front of the train; it also needs to move to the back, to shine on those working long night shifts, the employee badges on their chests, the resumes in the hands of graduates, and on those who are constantly told to "embrace change" but are turned away when it comes to reaping the rewards. The Samsung strike may ultimately end in compromise, arbitration, partial concessions, or a new bonus formula. Labor negotiations often follow this pattern: a grand opening, ending with a series of percentages, a written agreement, and a few carefully worded announcements. The news hype will fade, stock prices will continue to fluctuate, AI companies will release new models, and servers will consume even more chips. But some issues won't disappear with the negotiating table. The most pressing questions in the AI era aren't just about computing power, model speed, or chip cost. We need to consider whether those who personally drag the "future" into reality will ultimately receive a share of a secure life from it. This statement may not sound grand, but what ordinary people want isn't grand at all. Simply put, they want valuable work, a decent income, hope for the future, and to avoid being easily thrown off course when times change. The future must move forward, of course. But a train truly heading towards the future cannot only have a brightly lit engine.