Since September 9, the workers at the Samsung plant at Sriperambudur in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, have been on strike. Over a thousand workers have been on strike demanding increases in pay, among various other demands for improving their work conditions. The intensity and militancy shown in the strike, has been an inspiration. It has been twenty days as of the writing of this article, and the strike has inspired protest actions and solidarity from workers across the industrial belt.
The Samsung plant in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu is one of two factories in India, the other being in Noida in North India. The Sriperambudur factory makes Samsung’s popular television sets, refrigerators and washing machines, accounting for a third of Samsung’s $12 billion in revenue from India. This enormous revenue is built on the exploitation of the workers at their Indian factories.
Today, the workers at the Tamil Nadu factory have erupted in strike against the conditions the company has imposed on them. From the get go, the company and state police have attempted to clamp down on the workers. 118 workers on strike had been arrested, but were freed on September 16 in what has become an early victory in their struggle.
Causes of the strike
The immediate causes of the strike is two fold. Firstly, the recognition of the Samsung India Workers Union (SIWU), which has been pending since July of 2023, and increase in wages which are barely enough to meet expenses. The highest salary offered by the company stands at a mere 30,000 rupees a month, with the highest possible increment being 3000 rupees a month. Expenses for schooling alone takes out 100,000 rupees annually, leaving two thirds of a worker’s salary to cover essentials such as food, housing, and electricity. Workers at Samsung barely make enough, even at the highest pay grade, and get caught in a cycle of loans.
As of today, the SIWU membership accounts for a majority of Samsung India’s workforce spread across two major production hubs, numbering about 1500 out of 1723 of Samsung India’s workforce. The SIWU is linked with the national trade union network CITU, affiliated with the CPIM.
The struggle for recognition forms a long-standing demand of the union, and forms a major part of the strike. While there are laws protecting the right to organize and form trade unions, there is no mandate for companies to recognize trade unions once they are formed. Many companies exploit this loophole, especially foreign corporations operating in India.
The strike only grew after the company resorted to coercive tactics, and the mass arrest of 118 workers.
Samsung’s presence in India
Samsung’s factory at Chennai Tamil Nadu
South Korean and Japanese capital have a massive presence in India, especially in the manufacturing and electronics sector. Hyundai Motors corners 15% of the passenger car sector in India, LG, a major electronics conglomerate has 15% share of the smart TV market in India, its competitor Samsung has 16% share. In the refrigerator market, Samsung enjoys a 29% share while it’s competitor LG controls 30% share. Together, these three large Korean Chaebols control a sizeable sector of India’s electronics and passenger car industries.
The key to Samsung’s influence over the refrigerator and TV market in India, is the Sriperumbudur factory in Tamil Nadu, the very factory that is on strike today. The strike’s impact cannot be understated. Despite all attempts to counter the impact of the strike, the production at the plant remains low. Compressor production has dropped by nearly half from 13800 a day to 8000 units, refrigerator production has fallen from 10000 units a day to 700 units a day, and washing machine production has declined from 3000 to 1400 units a day. Only one fifth of the workforce at the Sriperumbudur plant are working.
India presents not just a major market for South Korean companies, but also a key production base for South Korean companies. India’s economic growth, fueled by aggressive proletarianization of the countryside, the rise of monopolies at the expense of petty capital, supplies a growing number of proletarians with nothing to sell but their labour power. With China and South East Asia’s workforce aging and wages rising, India is seen as the next most profitable nation for manufacturing.
Under the right wing government of the BJP, labour laws have been weakened, and conditions are being created for inviting foreign capital in manufacturing. ‘Make in India’ is the slogan to open India’s working class to exploitation at the hands of foreign manufacturing companies. Korean companies like Samsung are keen to cash in on the opportunity given. It is in this context that Samsung has announced the establishment of the world’s largest mobile phone factory in Noida, near Delhi.
While Korean companies profit from liberally exploiting Indian labour, the working class has to face harassment and oppression as their rights are attacked.
Korean capital’s influence over electronics and manufacturing isn’t limited to India, but is felt the world over. Samsung’s global commercial empire is built on the backs of vicious exploitation of its workforce. Just as in India, so too in South Korea, Samsung exploits its workers. They make billions by keeping their workforce on the edge of bankruptcy. Korean workers have risen in revolt against the company in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The workers at Sriperumbudur have expressed their solidarity with their Korean comrades. The workers of Korea have expressed their solidarity with their Indian comrades.
Samsung’s first electronics factory at Suwon 1969
Korean capitalism and the chaebols
Korea’s history is one of colonization and conquest. The Japanese were the first to colonize the Korean peninsula, beginning from expanding influence to outright annexing the country. The period of colonization saw the birth of a nascent Korean capitalist class, along with the deep penetration of Japanese capital into all sectors of life and society. The Japanese Empire had brutally smashed the old Confucian isolationist monarchy, and opened up the economy to exploitation, in turn sowing the seeds of a future indigenous capitalist class. It is worth mentioning that Samsung and LG (the two largest conglomerates of Korea) were both established in the colonial period.
With the end of WWII in Asia, a revolutionary process in East Asia had grown in strength, and secured a victory in China at the end of a brutal civil war. The impact of this revolutionary process came to Korea as well. Revolutionaries who had been trained and organized by the fight in China, were ready to bring the revolution to Korea. However, the great powers of the time, particularly the Soviet Union led by Stalin, and the United States, rushed to defeat such a revolution. The politics of the great powers trumped any democratic desire of the Korean people. The Korean revolution would be crushed by the dual power of Stalinism and Imperialism. While Stalin subjected the Korean revolution to the diktats of the Soviet High Command, and their puppet, the United States subjected the Korean people to one of the most brutal right-wing dictatorship of the 1950s.
South Korean capital was saved by bathing the peninsula in blood, as thousands of workers and peasants were massacred, with the full backing of the United States. Meanwhile, the North was organized around the party and it’s leadership of Kim Il Sung, under the model of a bureaucratic dictatorship. The two forces worked in tandem to destroy the potential of a peninsular revolution, and opened the path of war. The Korean war would be devastating, and the final straw which destroyed the possibility of a revolution in Korea and with it a wider East Asian revolution.
The Korean war resulted in a divided peninsula with a self-proclaimed ‘communist’ North and a capitalist South. The war saw much of the North completely destroyed, and the South suffered under a vicious right-wing dictatorship. The dictatorship sowed the seeds for the future growth of Korean conglomerates, backed liberally by the United States who now needed a bulwark against the Soviet Union and China. This set up created the conditions for the meteoric rise of South Korea’s capitalism, which today ranks in sophistication and influence among the most powerful nations in the world. At the heart of this growth, is the conglomerate of Samsung.
Korean Chaebols and Korean capitalism
Samsung Chairman (left) with S.Korea’s president Park Geun Hye (center)
After the war had ended, South Korea was built up as a militarized capitalist dictatorship. The Syngman Rhee dictatorship laid the foundations of the growth of a uniquely Korean style conglomerate structure, the Chaebol. The Chaebols are conglomerates run by the company’s founder and their family, closely held and well connected with the government apparatus. The control of the Chaebols over the South Korean economy is as vast as it is deep. The most powerful of the Chaebols is Samsung, whose president is sometimes considered more powerful than the President of the country. Samsung alone accounts for over one-fifth of South Korea’s export revenue of $1.74 trillion. Samsung maintains an expansive global commercial empire, a key part of which is in India.
South Korean capitalists benefitted from the dictatorship and the regime that succeeded it. Workers rights were crushed, unions were terrorized, and the Chaebols were allowed to grow by intensely exploiting their workforce, backed by a dictatorial state that was ready to stamp out any threat of ‘communism’. The companies were at liberty to set in a toxic work culture, one that continues till today.
Inspired by ruthless managerial techniques of the Japanese Empire, the Korean capitalists of the South installed a system called ‘gapjil’, in which workplace management called ‘gap’ oversaw subordinates called ‘jil’. The ‘jil’ must yield to the ‘gap’. The rigidity and toxicity of the workplace served the interests of the capitalist to rapidly grow their enterprise. Control over the work force goes hand in hand with keeping wages as low as possible.
The dictatorship ended in 1987, following the July 10 protests. The revolution itself was a democratic revolution, but it could not have been achieved without the militant workers of South Korea. Over 1985 and 1986, workers struck across industries in South Korea. The military dictatorship fell, but the new republic remained in the throes of the Chaebols and capitalists.
Ten years after the July 10 uprising, South Korea saw the largest general strike in the history of the country, this time protesting a new law which made it easier to hire and fire workers and clamp down on labour organization. The new law would also increase the legal work week by 12 hours, allow company to decide and modify work hours, and use scab labour to break strikes. The victory of the strike forced the new republican government to fall back, the Chaebols were defeated.
It improved working conditions greatly and made South Korean workers among the best paid in all of Asia. This defeat was not the end of the Chaebols, their insatiable desire for profit and power saw them leaving the limits of South Korea to set up factories across East and South East Asia. They came to India in 1995 just in time to exploit Indian labour, at a time when it was opening up to foreign capital, and dismantling the old state capitalist structure.
A scene from the 1996 General strike in South Korea
Korean Chaebols and especially Samsung maintain a heavy influence over South Korea, and have a commanding presence over its economy. With the 2008 financial crisis, and more recent crises from the COVID pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Korean economy is in crisis. As is always the case with capitalist crisis, it is the workers who are made to foot the bill. Workers have returned to striking in protest against low wages which do not keep up with cost of living. Just one month ago, Samsung workers under the National Samsung Electrics Union (NSEU) struck work for four days. Their strike resonated among workers in India as well.
Tamil Nadu’s rise as an industrial center
Tamil Nadu was previously part of Madras state, formed from the Madras presidency of the British Raj. Chennai, previously Madras, was one of the three main urban centers developed by the British Empire. Madras was the key urban and industrial center of Southern India, dominating the economy of South India. After independence, the Indian capitalist class largely focused on the development along the Bombay-Delhi axis, focusing investments in the region around the capital of New Delhi and the financial capital of Bombay (now Mumbai). At the same time, partition and instability led to the decline of the Eastern metropolis of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and the subsequent flight of industrial capital from East to West.
Investments in education in Southern India in the last decades of British rule, as well as during the Nehruvian era, created a base of educated working class in peninsular India. However, with industrial and financial investment concentrated in Western and Northern India, the South largely lagged behind. This was until the 80s and 90s, when India began to open up to foreign capital.
The regional bourgeoisie in South India tapped into the opportunity presented by the decline of West Bengal and Eastern India. At the same time, Bombay and Western India was beginning to stagnate as the old industrial centers began to get gutted. Bombay saw it’s great textile mills close, and industry shifting further into the Maharashtra hinterland. Delhi and North India remained underdeveloped owing to bad infrastructure and bureaucratic influence of the national capital. The South of the country with its large pool of cheap labour and low rents, coupled with cooperative bourgeois governments ready to curb any working class militancy, presented a good opportunity for industrial development.
Tamil Nadu has the highest number of factories in India and factory workers
The growth of Southern India coincided with the influx of foreign capital after the liberalizing reforms initiated in 1991. The skilled workforce in Southern India was perfectly poised to supply the labour demands of the IT sector, the growth of the IT sector would then draw in investments in other areas. Chennai (formerly Madras) became a hub for automotive manufacturing, and eventually electronics. Samsung entered the scene in the 90s and soon built a massive complex in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur.
The growth of Tamil Nadu as an industrial center could not be achieved without the dual force of heavy proletarianization of the countryside, and a ruthlessly pro-capitalist government which would welcome industry with open arms.
The significance of the strike
Samsung workers on strike in Seoul
Combined with the strike of Samsung workers in Seoul, the strike of the Samsung workers in South Korea, challenges a whole system of exploitation which built the Korean Chaebols. The wealth and power of Korean capital is fed by the most vicious exploitation of the working class. The Korean workers fought against it to gain benefits, now the Indian working class is fighting.
It is doubly significance that the Indian and Korean workers are in solidarity with one another. The Seoul strike was supported by the SIWU union in India, and the NSEU strike was supported by the workers in India. The tried and tested tactic of the bourgeoisie is divide and rule, the power of transnational corporations is their ability to shift production away from one center to another, where wages are cheaper or workers unorganized.
To challenge this requires solidarity, not just within an industrial sector, but beyond it across national boundaries. It is only through solidarity that the power of the capitalists can be challenged.
The strike in Samsung challenges the practices of Korean capitalism, and it has aroused the support of workers across the industrial belt. In much the same way, the strike at Honda in Manesar had challenged the exploitative system in Manesar Gurgaon. The workers need and deserve our fullest support !
NATIONALIZE SAMSUNG !
NATIONALIZE ALL FOREIGN ASSETS !
WAGES PEGGED TO INFLATION !
STRICTLY ENFORCE THE 8 HOUR WORK DAY !
