The Device eXperience (DX) union at Samsung Electronics said voting rights were excluded and sought an injunction to suspend the effect of a tentative wage agreement that it filed against the largest union at Samsung Electronics, the Samsung Group supra-enterprise labor union Samsung Electronics branch (hereafter the supra-enterprise union), but the court dismissed the case.
According to the industry on the 16th, the supra-enterprise union recently notified its members that regarding the injunction application related to the tentative wage agreement filed by Samsung Electronics Labor Union Donghaeng (Donghaeng union), Suwon District Court on the 11th dismissed and rejected the case, saying the court dismissed the request to suspend the effect of the tentative agreement as improper and rejected all remaining requests as groundless.
The court reportedly dismissed the Donghaeng union's request to suspend the effect on the grounds that there was no benefit in disputing a suspension because a tentative agreement between labor and management had already been concluded. The Donghaeng union applied for corrective measures, saying the supra-enterprise union abused its discretion and violated the duty of fair representation under the Trade Union and Labor Relations Adjustment Act (the duty of a bargaining representative union not to discriminate without reasonable cause against other unions that participated in the bargaining), but the court is said to have rejected it, noting that such a conclusion could not be made.
Earlier, on the 26th of last month, the Donghaeng union filed for an injunction with the court to halt voting on the tentative agreement, and when the vote ended, it changed the purpose of the injunction from stopping the vote to suspending the effect. The Donghaeng union said that after it withdrew from the joint struggle headquarters, the supra-enterprise union first said it would recognize the Donghaeng union's voting rights, then reversed its position and excluded it from the vote, arguing that once DX rallied, it abruptly stripped the voting rights. In the Donghaeng union's own vote on the tentative agreement, only 45 of 8,955 voted in favor.
In contrast, the supra-enterprise union argues that the Donghaeng union has no voting authority because it left the joint struggle headquarters. The Donghaeng union had formed a joint struggle headquarters with the supra-enterprise union and the National Samsung Electronics Labor Union (Jeonsamno) to negotiate with management, but, judging that the views of the DX institutional sector members were not being reflected, it left the joint struggle headquarters on the 4th of last month. In the yes-or-no vote on the tentative agreement without the Donghaeng union (May 22–27), the agreement passed with a 73.7% approval rate (46,142 in favor).
Even after the dismissal and rejection of the injunction, the Donghaeng union is expected to continue litigation related to the tentative agreement. In a notice to members, the supra-enterprise union said the Donghaeng union conveyed that it would additionally file a civil lawsuit. The Donghaeng union is reportedly reviewing a lawsuit to confirm the invalidity of the vote.
Although the tentative agreement passed, internal backlash continues over differentiated bonuses between the DX institutional sector and the Device Solutions (DS) institutional sector. The Donghaeng union's membership, which stood at 2,300 on the 7th of last month, has risen sharply to about 25,000 as of the 16th of this month. The Donghaeng union recently asked management to compensate DX institutional sector employees, who feel a significant sense of relative deprivation, with 1,000 shares of company stock per person (340 million won).