According to industry sources on the 15th, the LS Cable & System union, affiliated with the Korean Metal Workers' Federation under the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, plans to hold strike-launch rallies on the 16th at its Donghae plant in Gangwon Province and its Gumi plant in North Gyeongsang Province. Union members, mostly technical staff, will move between the Donghae and Gumi plants after shift changes, using off-duty hours to stage roughly one hour of industrial action at each site. Several hundred members are expected to take part in the rallies.
The rallies amount to a warning-level action signaling the possibility of a full strike. Depending on how the labor dispute unfolds, concerns are growing that it could escalate into an actual walkout. It marks the first time the LS Cable & System union has taken strike action, even partial, since its founding in 1989.
Behind the move lies a gap between labor and management over how to expand employee compensation. The union argues that while the company has posted sharp earnings growth on surging demand for transmission and distribution cables and busducts used in Big Tech data centers, it has been relatively reluctant to expand compensation.
LS Cable & System posted first-half revenue of 4.52 trillion won and operating profit of 238.4 billion won, up 18% and 44% respectively from a year earlier, driven by a surge in demand for transmission and distribution cables and busducts for data centers. Its subsidiary Gaon Cable (000500) has secured cumulative busduct orders worth more than 5 trillion won from U.S. Big Tech firms, and its main cable production lines are running at full capacity. By contrast, the company's half-year report shows average pay for its 2,268 employees at 38 million won in the first half, not high compared with other major industries including semiconductors.
Management's position, according to sources, is that the nature of the business means actual operating profit remains thin, and with trillions of won in plant expansion investment under way, there is little room to raise compensation aggressively. Because of heavy raw material costs including copper, the company's operating margin stayed at 5.3% in the first half even as operating profit grew sharply. In the United States alone it is investing more than 2 trillion won, building a 1 trillion won extra-high-voltage submarine cable plant and a separate 1 trillion won rare earth plant. It is also planning a 230 billion won busduct plant in Mexico and additional investments in Korea and Europe.
LS Cable & System said, "Under our co-CEO structure, wage negotiations are being led by the CEO in charge of win-win management," adding, "Disputes arising from differences between labor and management can certainly occur, and we will resolve this amicably based on our track record of cooperation to date."
Some observers expect that dissatisfaction over pay and labor-management conflict could spread from industry leader LS Cable & System to other power infrastructure companies.
