Hyundai Steel decides to close some of its Dangjin Steelworks in response to union strikes (South Korea)

Hyundai Steel has implemented a partial shutdown of its cold rolling mill facilities at its Dangjin Steelworks. This was in response to economic and social problems resulting from the labor union's repeated industrial action and its demands for unreasonable performance-based pay.
The company explained that this was a defensive decision to minimize losses. According to the Korean steel industry, the company announced that it would shut down the cold rolling plant PL/TCM (Picklin Steel Manufacturing/TCM) at its Dangjin Steel Works from noon on the 24th.
PL/TCM carried out a partial shutdown of its production line (Primary Line/Tandem Cold Mill). Prior to the production of cold-rolled steel sheets, PL/TCM removes impurities from the surface of hot-rolled steel sheets.
The PL/TCM is a facility that performs pre-rolling to remove the strip from the cold-rolled steel sheet and send it to the cold-rolled steel sheet production line, which is the subsequent process.
The company said that the reason behind the decision to partially close the workplace was that "the Hyundai Steel Karatsu Cold Rolling Branch Labor Union is carrying out a partial strike at PL/TCM."
However, this has resulted in the suspension of operations not only at the process in question but at all cold rolling processes, resulting in huge losses for the company and a deterioration in its business due to a decline in customer trust."
In particular, since January 21 of last year, there have been repeated general strikes and partial/temporary strikes restricting certain parts of the continuous production line.
This has caused difficulties in determining the overall production schedule and has also hindered the stability of operations.
The company added that it had decided to close the PL/TCM facility defensively in order to prevent the spread of the virus.
"Now we have a reason to fight back," he said. The company's labor and management have been engaged in collective negotiations since meeting in September last year, but have been unable to reach an agreement. The company has set a basic salary of 450%.
The company proposed to add 10 million won to the salary, but the labor union did not accept this. The company's business performance for 2024 was a net profit of 47.3 billion won on a separate basis, but the results were
Since Kim's proposal, the deficit has turned to about 65 billion won, and the company has revised the amount. Meanwhile, the company suffered a production loss of about 270,000 tons in the cold rolling division due to a labor dispute that lasted from the 1st to the 22nd,
The losses are expected to reach 25.4 billion won (about 2.6 billion yen).