POSCO Just Had Its First Strike in 58 Years — and the Company That Never Struck Was Never Peaceful

For 58 years, South Korea's POSCO sold itself on a myth: the steel giant that never had a strike, the model of harmonious labor relations that survived the Asian financial crisis, the 2008 crash, and COVID without a single work stoppage. That myth died this month. Twice. On September 9 and again on September 16, POSCO's union — affiliated with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions — walked out at the Pohang and Gwangyang steelworks, first for 48 hours, then for a 120-hour partial strike, with roughly twice as many workers joining the second round.

The company and the business press are treating this as an aberration, a break from tradition. It isn't. It's the tradition finally cracking. POSCO was built in 1968 as a state-private joint venture under Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship, engineered from the start as a flagship of disciplined, strike-free industrial policy. Fifty-eight years of "labor peace" at a company that size, in a country with an independent, often militant labor movement, was never a natural equilibrium — it was manufactured through decades of state-aligned company unionism, and it held even through the founding of the more combative Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in 1995. When workers finally broke it, they didn't do it over an abstraction. They did it over concrete material grievances: a 7.1% wage demand against a company whose operating profit nearly halved amid a steel slump, mandatory overtime violating the legal 52-hour week, staffing shortages, and — the real trigger — POSCO's April decision to directly hire roughly 7,000 subcontracted workers following a Supreme Court ruling against illegal dispatch labor, which spooked permanent unionized workers into thinking their benefits would be diluted.

That last point matters more than the wage fight. It's the same dynamic playing out across Korean manufacturing and globally: employers use layered subcontracting to keep a two-tier workforce, suppress collective bargaining leverage, and dodge liability, until courts or workers force the issue and the whole arrangement destabilizes. POSCO's "no-strike" record wasn't proof the system worked. It was proof the system successfully kept a workforce divided and quiet for six decades — until a Supreme Court ruling on dispatch labor and a profit slump broke the terms of the old bargain at the same time.

Zoom out and the picture gets starker. South Korea's overall union density collapsed to a low of 9.8% in 2010 — a country famous internationally for militant unionism reduced to single digits, thinner than even the neoliberal-gutted US or UK figures of the same years. It clawed back to 14.2% by 2020-21 on the strength of public-sector and platform-worker organizing, then slipped again to 13.0% by 2023. POSCO's blue-collar chaebol fortress sat outside that whole story, immune to both the collapse and the recovery, because it was never counted as a normal labor market — it was a controlled one. That control has now visibly failed. Management's response — a wage freeze pitch, then token concessions, alongside outrage that the union is paying striking workers a daily solidarity stipend — is the same playbook used against every strike everywhere: frame worker solidarity as corruption, frame the employer's concession as generosity, and hope the story ends before anyone asks why it took 58 years and a court ruling to get here.

It won't end there. Korean steel is entangled with automotive and shipbuilding supply chains that can't absorb prolonged disruption quietly, and the subcontracting fight POSCO workers are having is the same fight autoworkers, dockworkers, and platform couriers are having from Michigan to Manitoba to Seoul. A "no-strike tradition" that lasts 58 years inside a democracy isn't stability. It's the sound of a workforce being told, for six decades, that it had no other option — until this month, it stopped listening.

Sources

POSCO Hit by First Strike in 58 Years, Threatening Steel Output — Sedaily

Posco union strikes as profit halves, sparks 'strike pay' controversy — Herald Business

POSCO's 58-Year Strike-Free Record Ends as Union Gains Right to Strike — Aju Press

Workers stage second partial strike at POSCO over wage demands — IANS/Prokerala

Trade Union Density Rate of Selected Countries — Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training