Samsung union chief Choi's $26.6B AI bonus win splits workers

A 35-year-old union chair who won South Korea's biggest AI-era payout is now running an organization that has shed over a quarter of its members in a matter of weeks. That is the arc Bloomberg lays out in its profile of Choi Seung-ho, the Samsung Electronics union leader who narrowly averted a May 21 strike with a 40 trillion won ($26.6 billion) profit-share deal and is already living with the backlash.

The deal itself is unusually structured. Samsung agreed to distribute 10.5% of its profits as stock plus another 1.5% in cash, running for ten years and gated on annual profit targets of at least 200 trillion won through 2028, stepping down to 100 trillion won in later years. The union had originally asked for 15%. Semiconductor employees are looking at an average payout of about 513 million won, roughly $339,000, with some reporting placing top figures near $400,000.

The catch, and it is a big one, is who the AI boom actually pays. Colleagues in Samsung's less profitable divisions were promised bonuses as low as 1% of what their memory-chip counterparts received. A union that once exceeded 76,000 members has fallen to around 55,200. In a confidence vote covered by The Korea Herald, Choi kept the chair with 88% support, drawing 33,550 favorable votes out of 38,336 cast on 70.8% turnout, but he now leads an organization representing less than half of Samsung's domestic workforce.

The honest caveat is that this is a personality-led profile of one labor leader at one company, not a systemic account of how AI profits get shared across Korean industry, and the specific bonus figures land as reported ranges rather than confirmed end-of-year payouts. What the reporting does not tell you is what happens if Samsung misses the 200 trillion won profit floor, or whether the non-chip divisions get their own deal to close the gap.

The forward-looking piece is that a concrete number now exists in the market. Any employer whose AI story runs on a narrow slice of technical talent, whether that is HBM engineers, foundry staff, or model-serving teams, now has a reference point for what parity with the company's profit curve looks like, and a live cautionary tale about what happens when only one slice of the workforce shares in it.