POSCO劳资谈判再度破裂，CEO取消赴美行程应对首次罢工威胁

POSCO Holdings CEO Lee Hee-keun abruptly canceled a planned trip to the United States to personally handle wage negotiations with the labor union, as the steelmaker faces the first strike threat in its 58-year history. The CEO appealed to employees through an internal message for a broad-minded decision for the company's future, but main negotiations that had been difficult to arrange broke down again.
According to business sources on the 4th, Lee had originally been scheduled to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the Hyundai-POSCO Louisiana Steel mill (HPLS) in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, that day but scrapped the plan just before departure. Labor-management conflict over the wage talks had reached its peak, and a main negotiation session had been arranged only with difficulty after the National Labor Relations Commission halted mediation on the 18th of last month. The POSCO union rejected management's proposal to hold working-level talks first and demanded going straight to main negotiations. It also issued a final warning that it would begin a 48-hour limited partial strike starting on the 9th unless management presented an improved offer.
In these wage talks, the union is demanding a 7.1% increase in base pay, an incentive payment equal to 600% of monthly wages, 50 shares under the employee stock ownership plan and holiday bonuses equal to 200%. The union argues that management has been stingy with employee compensation while citing the industry downturn, even as it pours astronomical sums into new businesses, and that fair compensation is therefore due. Management, by contrast, balked, saying that fully accepting the union's demands would require about 1.4 trillion won ($1 billion) in funding, double the amount from last year. As the two sides remained at odds and the labor commission's mediation was halted, the union secured the legal right to industrial action. In an earlier vote on industrial action, 92.17% of members voted in favor, meaning an actual strike would put an end to 58 years without a labor dispute since the company's founding in 1968.
At the main negotiation session held the previous day, management put some revised terms on the table but failed to clear the union's threshold. "Management presented a finely adjusted proposal, but we could not narrow the gap on the core issues," a union official said. "Measures directly tied to worker safety are still empty-handed, which is deeply disappointing." The union said, however, that it would not close the channel for dialogue until the 9th, the final deadline it has set.
Lee, who dug in by abruptly canceling the trip, sent a letter to executives and employees on the 2nd, a day before the main negotiations, stressing compromise. "When I heard the news that the union had given notice of a partial strike, my heart felt like it was collapsing — not as a management official first, but as someone who devoted his youth here," Lee said in the letter. After pointing to internal and external business crises including the onslaught of low-priced Chinese steel and the spread of global protectionism, he expressed concern that "if our facilities stop at this moment, the fallout will spread beyond the fences of the steelworks and threaten the livelihoods of the local community and the families of countless partner companies." The consequences of choosing to strike, he said, would not end with a weakening of the company's competitiveness but would come back to affect employees themselves, their households and their children's future.
"What we must protect now is not a small victory at the negotiating table but the sustainable future of the company that we will pass on to the next generation," Lee said. He added: "Nor do we take the union's demands for better treatment lightly. We will continue to approach negotiations with a responsible attitude and will not let go of the thread of dialogue and compromise."