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Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar
- akg_67 5mo agoAnd, soon someone will come along claiming unions and strikes don’t work. /s
- teinnt 5mo agoNext post will detail a 300 percent increase in chip workers LOL
- imp0cat 5mo agoThey would, if they could! Starting new chip fabs is not that easy.
- 4d4m 5mo agoThis is wonderful!
- ChoGGi 5mo agoFinally, some feel good news about AI.
- nielsbot 5mo agoFrom our laid off workers pockets to Samsung employees’!
- dannyw 5mo agoThat seems like false equivalence. The overall economy is not zero sum.
- nielsbot 5mo agono--i was just making a slightly silly point about tech companies 1) laying off workers and 2) spending that cash on infrastructure (including chips) which goes to 3) Samsung and in this case 4) its workers.
- bayarearefugee 5mo agoMeanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires who wouldn't piss on them to put out a fire and arguing about why we can't have unions because blah blah blah rugged individualism.
- sanxiyn 5mo agoThe union makes us strong. -- A proud programming union worker in South Korea since 2018.
- Swizec 5mo ago> Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires Tech pulled a great trick here: equity. America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.
- anon291 5mo agoWell yeah America has achieved what the communists sought: public ownership of the means of production . Today most of the American public owns the largest means of production in government advantaged accounts. Marx ought to be proud
- yogthos 5mo agohttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-93-033623827.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
- foxglacier 5mo agoSo basically most older professionals, and today's young professionals will step into their shoes as they grow their wealth over time too. Which means probably far more than 10% of the population will at some point in their life belong to that group which owns 90% of the means of production.
- boguscoder 5mo agoAny bonus is better than no bonus but averages are deceiving. Maybe VPs would get 10m and line workers 10k ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- willio58 5mo agoYeah give me the median
- vardalab 5mo agoNot all workers will fare equally. As an illustration, Reuters cited a union source estimating that someone in the memory chip unit earning an 80-million-won base salary could take home roughly 626 million won in total bonuses this year. By comparison, workers at SK Hynix stand to collect upward of 700 million won should their employer post annual profit of 250 trillion won, Reuters calculated. Unlike at Samsung, SK Hynix employees are not limited to stock payouts and may instead opt for cash, Reuters reported. Almost 6x the base, not bad.
- Danox 5mo agoThey probably had to fight hard to get it and stick together…
- yladiz 5mo agoMy understanding of the article is that it affects actual chip workers, since it’s the union of those workers that will be affected.
- segmondy 5mo agoright here in good ol USA, workers are getting laid off. Plenty of folks will be happy without a bonus right now if they could just have a job.
- snayan 5mo agoIs your understanding that the VPs are in the same union as the line workers? That would be... interesting. I do not believe that is the case.
- xbar 5mo agoNice. Now, the Fortune 500, please.
- yogthos 5mo agounions work
- plemer 5mo agoBut who will protect the interests of capital??
- greesil 5mo agoCapital, politicians, conservatives, libertarians,
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoWe’ve gotta add American Liberals, majority of Democratic Party to the list. The Sanders faction is unfortunately not yet the prevailing force.
- culi 5mo agoAround the world "liberal" is synonymous with "capitalist". US is pretty unique in that it considers liberalism a leftwing ideology
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoYeah for sure, speaking purely on the American common framing of big L Liberals as akin to social liberals rather than classical/economic liberals.
- overfeed 5mo agoLeft/Right alignment is relative, and the American political center is...where it is, and has been drifting rightward since Bill Clinton's "Third Way".
- ThrowawayR2 5mo agoNo longer true; the left wing in the U.S. started splitting from the liberals over a decade ago and that's more or less complete at this point.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo agoThat's literally insane for Korean living standards. Those people can basically retire
- barumrho 5mo agoThat's a bit of a stretch, but the number is bigger than I expected!
- Adiqq 5mo agoImagine the world, where instead of making billionaires and trillionaires, we would actually share with society. Providing affordable products/services to common people. Decommodification of life. There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them. So, if there's no money for public investments, it's time to show there's no public for their wars and exploitation.
- aetherspawn 5mo agoEngineers are awful at advocating for themselves, and that’s why they study and work twice as hard as lawyers and finance, have less perks (travel, food, cars, private offices) yet they get paid half as much.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- recursivedoubts 5mo agoMost engineers who advocate for themselves would simply be fired. Job hopping was the way to get your salary up fast previously.
- autoexec 5mo agoThat sounds like the kind of problem unions were invented to solve.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThis is what bonuses would average out to in the US as well. It’s just that the CEO would get $100 million and the workers maybe $10k each. Does the article say how it’s going to work?
- virgildotcodes 5mo agoMaybe that’s still what’s happening, they’re talking about average after all :)
- winter_blue 5mo agoPerhaps U.S. workers could threaten to strike as well...
- vrganj 5mo agoDon't be silly, we're all special individuals here and unions are bad! We definitely haven't been brainwashed to act against our best interests.
- Danox 5mo agoThe Molly Maguire‘s lost a long time ago in America, the Goons, Pinkerton’s and the owners saw to that with a little help from the government and the police of course.
- rcbdev 5mo ago> Does the article say how it’s going to work? You pay them the bonus, it shows on the pay cheque, like every salary bonus. What about this is something you'd expect in an article?
- yellow_lead 5mo agoThe distribution of bonuses instead of an average
- dyauspitr 5mo agoI mean how the bonuses are going to be distributed based on hierarchy in the company
- VerifiedReports 5mo agoMeanwhile, U.S. companies are cutting our already-shitty vacation and leave.
- Sam6late 5mo ago[dead]
- penguin_booze 5mo agoWhen the government is: of the many, for the few.
- cosmobiosis 5mo agoI'm never a big fan of Samsung haha. I'm more like a fan of Google as hardware
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoSo does Samsung have a union? How about TSMC or ASML?
- dlenski 5mo ago> So does Samsung have a union? Are you being sarcastic? It's literally mentioned in the first sentence of the article, as well as the subheading.
- startpage_com 5mo ago[dead]
- agentifysh 5mo agoI do wonder if this is good for Korea in the long run. There's not many employers like Samsung and SK that can provide this level of compensation for cost centers. I think many more workers are going to start demanding red carpet treatment when companies are choosing to outright shut down or move operations out of Korea due to increasing pressure from unions. ex) Hanjin, SsangYong Motor, GM, Renault Samsung/Renault Korea, Nestle, Tetra Pak, Hyundai Motor, HomePlus....
- thrownthatway 5mo ago> chip workers > cost centres What? In what way are manufacturing workers a cost centre? They aren’t call centre workers.
- choudharism 5mo agoIt is an abhorrent reflection of the society that this is a valid kneejerk response.
- tuesdaynight 5mo agoWorkers are supposed to always be worried about the overall economy, but companies firing thousands of people can ignore everything that is not related with their revenue/profit. It's hilarious. I remember when I had these kind of takes. I blindly believed in "equal treatment, including billionaires". Now I get frustrated reading them, but I have empathy from understanding where they come from (for now, at least).
- agentifysh 5mo agoI just find it funny someone who worked at Amazon would type that to feel good about themselves.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 5mo agoIt probably is. Sharing in what is essentially a massive windfall is most likely positive. This money will get spend or invested by employees. Which should stimulate the economy at much higher level if it just stayed in stock market. This is not standard thing. This is response in situation where company has generated massively more profit than any time previously and likely any time in future after market stabilises. Expectation that at least part is shared with employees should not be unreasonable.
- dahuangf 5mo agoSamsung chip workers get $340k bonuses. American tech workers get laid off because AI is 'optimizing headcount.' Different kind of AI dividend
- IncreasePosts 5mo agoWhat do you think will happen to these chip workers as their jobs get automated with AI?
- krupan 5mo agoThat is so far away. There is approximately 0 public training data for chip design. Just try asking an LLM to design hardware, it's laughable EDIT: just realized I'm not sure what a "chip worker" in this article is. Someone doing digital design? Someone working in the fab? Hmm
- missedthecue 5mo agoThese samsung workers are producing the compute that reduces demand for american coders. It's like pointing out that tractor factorymen are getting bonuses while the stable-manager gets laid off. Well of course.
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- jinwoo68 5mo agoDo not get deceived by the average number. I'm pretty sure that most of the money of the total goes to a handful of people, and the small remaining amount will be shared by the rest. Emphasizing the average amount is just their PR strategy.
- akabalanza 5mo agoBig up for the unions!