- Samsung’s labor deal highlights a global movement of workers demanding a fair share of record AI-driven profits.
- From Kenyan data annotators to Hollywood actors, laborers across the supply chain are challenging the surge in “AI billionaires” as automation continues to drive widespread job cuts.
- The conflict has sparked broader debates on “citizen’s dividends” to ensure the wealth created by AI is distributed more equitably.
Samsung Electronics narrowly averted a walkout by nearly 48,000 workers this week, after executives agreed to a tentative deal over bonus payments. But the labor union’s demand for a bigger share of profits from the company’s semiconductor business has sparked questions — in South Korea and elsewhere — about who benefits from the AI industry, and whether its rewards should be shared more equitably.
Samsung, the world’s biggest memory chip maker, has reported record profits in recent months amid a global shortage of memory chips. The labor union had demanded the company allocate 15% of operating profit to bonuses for all workers, not just those at the memory chip division that supplies Tesla, Nvidia, and other big tech companies.
“As the AI industry drives record operating profits, union members are in a structure where they cannot receive the performance-based rewards they deserve,” Choi Seung-ho, head of Samsung’s union, told Rest of World. “We want to change that.”
Their demand struck a chord in the country, with a top policymaker proposing a “citizen’s dividend,” or a portion of the excess profits from the AI boom to be distributed among its 52 million people. That would ensure social stability, and help mitigate the cost of the economic transition being brought about by AI, Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post before the deal was reached.
Profits “border on the unthinkable”
For economists, labor analysts, and policymakers studying AI’s effects on the economy, the Samsung dispute is not a conventional wage negotiation, but “one of the most significant labor actions we have seen,” Adrian Brown, chief executive of Windfall Trust think tank which aims to develop responses to AI’s disruption, told Rest of World.
The workers “know their labor is part of the AI value chain, and they are asking a straightforward question: If this technology is generating record profits, who has a legitimate claim on a share of them?” Brown said.
The sums of money that the AI boom has created for a select few “border on unthinkable,” according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Last year, 29 founders minted fortunes worth a collective $71 billion, it showed. Over the past year, U.S. startups alone have created 19 billionaires worth a combined $59 billion, the report said. The new AI rich “are proliferating at a mind-boggling pace.”
That pace is picking up. SpaceX this week filed for an initial public offering that values the company at over $2 trillion, and could make founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. OpenAI and Anthropic are also expected to file for IPOs this year, which would make several of their senior executives billionaires.
Meanwhile, big tech companies including Meta, Amazon, and Oracle have announced tens of thousands of job cuts this year, with several executives saying they are redirecting investment into AI. Of the nearly 130,000 layoffs announced since the start of the year, about 77,000 are linked to AI adoption or investment — 60% of the total, according to estimates by TradingPlatforms, a financial services firm.
$59 billion Worth of 19 new AI founders created in the U.S. in the last year.
AI gains rest on publicly funded research, government-backed infrastructure, decades of scientific work, and the labor of people throughout the supply chain — from chip fabrication to data labeling to content moderation, Brown said. Yet the rewards are “concentrating in a small number of firms and their investors, while the costs and risks are being distributed much more broadly,” he said.
From Kenya to San Francisco
Under the terms of the proposal at Samsung, the company abolished a cap on bonuses, and will link bonuses to operating profits. It will also set aside about 10.5% of operating profit for special bonuses for the chip division. Rival SK Hynix similarly agreed, last year, to allocate 10% of annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool.
“This is likely an early signal of a much broader politics,” Brown said. “Globally, workers are beginning to make the same claim: a rightful share, grounded in contribution.”
Elsewhere, Kenyan data annotation workers formed an association last year to demand fair pay and conditions. Voice actors worldwide are forming unions to press for compensation for the use of their data to train AI models, and Hollywood actors are calling for a “Tilly tax” — named for the AI actor Tilly Norwood — a levy on AI-generated performers that will go toward benefits for real actors.
Outside a courthouse near San Francisco, during the OpenAI v. Elon Musk trial, campaigners lobbying for better wages for workers gathered with a large banner that said, “Workers demand a piece of the pie.”
In his Facebook post, presidential policy chief Kim said that South Korea has a rare opportunity to transform from being a mere provider of AI infrastructure to becoming the first nation “to return the excess profits of the AI era to the enrichment of human life.”
At Samsung, the unequal bonuses had led to deep divisions between workers at the different units, and caused several employees to quit, the union said. The agreement does not give workers everything they demanded, but the bonus is now institutionalized, locked in for a decade, and built on a transparent formula, leader Choi said.
“If the results that we worked hard to create together are taken only by the company, we think that is unreasonable” he said. “We want Samsung Electronics to do well, we want South Korea to do well, and we want ourselves to do well.”