Who Can Stop Semiconductor Production? Capital Vintage and Worker Representation at Samsung Electronics in the Age of AI Chips, 2018–2025

Abstract The 2024 strike at Samsung Electronics in South Korea was the first in the company’s fifty-five-year history. It sought to disrupt production first on less-automated foundry lines producing legacy semiconductors and then on highly automated lines producing high-bandwidth memory, stacked memory for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. Production effects remained contested, and stoppages yielded no clear bargaining gain. This article argues that capital investment and automation distribute labor power unevenly within a firm: differences in production systems’ age and degree of automation can separate sites of greater potential labor leverage from those of greater strategic value. I call this relationship among fixed-capital age, automation, and labor dependence “capital vintage.” At Samsung, newer capacity producing its most valuable chips was more automated, while older lines remained more labor-dependent but less strategically valuable. Capital vintage anchors the analysis of leverage, legibility, and legitimacy. The strike showed that potential production leverage did not automatically make wage demands publicly legible, especially when strikers were portrayed as among the country’s top earners. The union therefore gave greater weight to an existing occupational-health strategy, drawing on decades of civil-legal conflicts that made injured workers’ bodily harm a recognizable basis for claims against Samsung. Yet its 2025 internal crisis showed that public legibility could not substitute for representative legitimacy, which depended on union members’ support. The article brings workers who manufacture AI’s material foundations into scholarship on worker power and automation. It draws on Korean- and English-language daily, union and company documents, statutory instruments, and civil-society materials.