SK Hynix workers form unified union amid stalled wage talks

When your employer posts record profits and then tries to tinker with the bonus formula that made those profits feel shared, you tend to notice. Workers at SK Hynix, South Korea’s dominant memory chipmaker, noticed enough to launch a brand-new unified union on August 5, and roughly 4,000 of them signed up almost immediately. The rapid mobilization, representing about 11% of SK Hynix’s approximately 35,000-person workforce, is a direct response to five rounds of wage negotiations that have gone essentially nowhere. The new union’s organizers aren’t just looking to vent. They want to consolidate three existing, fragmented unions into a single bargaining bloc with enough members to force management back to the table on their terms. What sparked the walkout from the old playbook The origin story traces back to a profit-sharing agreement struck in 2025. Under that deal, SK Hynix committed to allocating 10% of its annual operating profit to employee bonuses. In practice, that meant a payout worth 2,964% of monthly base salary, a staggering number that reflected just how good a year the company had riding the AI-driven memory chip boom. Management apparently had second thoughts about the ...