The Ministry of Employment and Labor issued guidelines on the 3rd for the revised trade union law, but critics say the guidance leaves strike risks at industrial sites unresolved. While management decisions such as building a new plant are excluded from labor disputes, the reassignment of workers needed to operate newly created units remains open to bargaining and industrial action.
The guidelines could also create fresh confusion over when a dispute becomes permissible. Under the guidance, the construction of a new plant is not itself subject to bargaining, but once specific staffing plans are drawn up and decided, and changes to working conditions such as reassignment can be objectively anticipated, related matters may become bargaining subjects. The government says it will distinguish between management decisions themselves and the resulting changes to working conditions, but separating the two is difficult in practice. Deploying existing workers to a new plant inevitably involves changes in work location or job duties, meaning routine personnel assignments could escalate into points of contention between labor and management.
The issue could become a variable in investment execution, particularly in advanced manufacturing such as Samsung Electronics' semiconductor megaprojects, where skilled workers are essential. If bargaining over the assignment of core engineers drags on or leads to industrial action, a completed plant may not begin operating on schedule. Some argue the guidance merely pushes back a potential strike by Samsung Electronics' union — one that could otherwise occur now — by about three years to the expected completion date of 2030. "The capacity to deploy workers at the right time, not just capital and technology, is central to semiconductor competitiveness," a business community official said. "We must prevent uncertain labor regulation from sapping the momentum of national strategic projects."
Similar disputes could surface as public institutions relocate to provincial areas. The decision to relocate is a management decision and therefore not subject to industrial action, but once transfer and assignment plans for employees take concrete shape and changes to working conditions are expected, related matters may become bargaining subjects. Because employees of public institutions are in principle ordinary workers, the possibility of disputes arising during relocation cannot be ruled out, depending on labor relations at each institution.
Business groups are especially concerned about indirect bargaining strategies that use staff reassignment as leverage. A union could refrain from opposing the construction of a new plant itself while demanding negotiations that bundle subsequent staffing, changes in work location, and wage and benefit issues. The labor ministry says it will recommend that demands falling outside the scope of industrial action be revised during mediation by the Labor Relations Commission, and will issue administrative guidance if unions do not comply. But if demands such as opposition to investment and reassignment or wages are mixed into a single bargaining proposal, disputes between labor and management over where the line falls could persist.
For companies, the mere possibility of industrial action over reassignment can be a considerable burden. If a union makes excessive demands for housing support or relocation allowances tied to a change in work location and links them to the construction of a new plant, the company will find it hard to refuse outright. If plant operations are delayed while legal judgments over the boundary between personnel authority and working conditions drag on, the costs borne by companies also grow. Even without an actual strike, the possibility of a dispute over reassignment alone could strengthen a union's bargaining power during investment execution.
The Korea Enterprises Federation said that if ordinary personnel authority to allocate human resources to newly created units becomes subject to industrial action, it could directly disrupt large-scale investment. "If the assignment of core workers who cannot be secured through new hiring alone is blocked, a situation could arise in which a completed plant cannot be operated," the federation said.
Academics also warn that the scope of personnel and management rights could be narrowed excessively. "An interpretation that draws the after-the-fact distribution of business performance and routine workforce redeployment based on personnel authority into the realm of industrial action is not a substantive guarantee of the three basic labor rights," said Kim Hee-sung, a professor at Kangwon National University School of Law. "It will instead only produce the counterproductive effect of blocking internal flexibility at companies and driving employment outside them."
Kwon Hyuk, a professor at Korea University's Graduate School of Labor Studies, criticized the guidance. "A collective agreement is not simply a conversation but a procedure for making legally binding decisions," he said. "By pushing the employer's exclusive authority over personnel assignment into the category of mandatory bargaining subjects, it has effectively turned this into an area of joint labor-management decision-making." He added: "What matters in bargaining agendas is not the timing of when plans are drawn up but whether working conditions are maintained or improved. Emphasizing timing is a technical problem that arose from trying to include management prerogatives as subjects of industrial action."
