LS电气（LS Cable & System）工会9月16日举行37年来首次罢工警告集会，但仅为下班后约一小时的警告性行动，尚无实质停产

LS Cable Union Holds First Strike Warning Rallies in 37-Year History - Seoul Economic Daily
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Members of the LS Cable & System labor union stage a protest in Seoul on July 21. Photo courtesy of the LS Cable & System labor union
LS Cable, South Korea's largest power infrastructure company, faces its first strike in the 37 years since its labor union was founded. Demand for artificial intelligence data centers from global tech giants has pushed the power infrastructure industry into a supercycle, but discontent has grown among employees who say compensation has not kept pace.
The LS Cable 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 the company's Donghae plant in Gangwon Province and its Gumi plant in North Gyeongsang Province, according to industry sources on the 15th. Union members, drawn mainly from technical positions, will move between the Donghae and Gumi sites during off-duty hours after shift changes and stage roughly one hour of industrial action at each location. Several hundred workers are expected to take part in the launch rallies.
The rallies are a warning-level action signaling the possibility of a full strike later. Depending on how the labor dispute unfolds, concerns have grown that the action could expand into an actual walkout. It marks the first time the LS Cable union has moved toward a strike, even a partial one, since it was established in 1989.
Behind the strike is a gap between labor and management over how far to expand employee compensation. The union argues that the company has posted sharp earnings growth as demand surged for transmission and distribution cables and bus ducts needed for data centers built by big tech firms, yet has been relatively reluctant to raise compensation.
LS Cable posted revenue of 4.5232 trillion won and operating profit of 238.4 billion won in the first half of this year, up 18% and 44% respectively from a year earlier, as demand jumped for transmission and distribution cables and bus ducts required by data centers. Its subsidiary Gaon Cable (000500.KS) has secured cumulative bus duct orders worth more than 5 trillion won from U.S. tech giants, and its main cable production lines are running at full capacity. By contrast, the company's semiannual report showed 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 operating profit it actually earns remains small given the nature of the business, and that with plant expansion investments running into trillions of won under way, it lacks the capacity to raise compensation aggressively. Because raw material purchase costs including copper are large, LS Cable's operating margin stood at 5.3% in the first half of this year even as operating profit grew sharply. In the United States alone, the company is building a 1 trillion won extra-high-voltage submarine cable plant and a separate 1 trillion won rare earth plant, committing more than 2 trillion won in total. It is also planning a 230 billion won bus duct plant in Mexico, along with additional investments in South Korea and Europe.
Some in the industry expect employee dissatisfaction over working conditions and labor-management friction to spread to other power infrastructure companies, starting with market leader LS Cable.
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Original reporting by
Kim Yoon-soo
for Seoul Economic Daily.
AI-translated from Korean. Quotes from foreign sources are based on Korean-language reports and may not reflect exact original wording.
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