POSCO's Workers Just Ended 58 Years of Managed Silence

On September 9, at 7 a.m., around 120 workers at POSCO's Pohang and Gwangyang steelworks walked off cold-rolling and pickling lines for 48 hours. That is roughly one percent of the company's 10,100 union members, at a company management insists never had a strike since its 1968 founding. The company says production wasn't touched. And yet Korean and international steel press are treating this as historic, because the number was never the point — the breach was.

POSCO was built as a state project under Park Chung-hee's dictatorship, financed with Japanese colonial reparations money the state chose to spend on steel mills instead of paying it directly to victims. Six decades of “no-strike” wasn't labour peace freely chosen; it was the residue of a company town built inside an authoritarian development model, where a docile workforce was the product being sold to the state as much as the steel was. That record surviving South Korea's own democratization, its 1987 wave of general strikes, and every downturn since says less about POSCO's workers being satisfied than about how deep the machinery of discipline in company unionism can run.

The dispute itself is the standard shape: the Korean Federation of Metalworkers' Unions POSCO chapter wants a 7.1% base pay rise, a 600% incentive bonus, employee shares, and a 200% holiday bonus. Management, citing a 43% first-half profit drop blamed on Chinese oversupply and tariff wars, offered 2% and one-off gift certificates. POSCO Holdings' own 2025 numbers back up part of that squeeze — consolidated operating profit fell 16% year-on-year to 1.8 trillion won — but the union isn't buying the poverty plea. Their counter-argument is structural: POSCO Holdings, the parent spun off in 2022, keeps collecting dividends and brand-licensing fees from the steelworks while telling the shop floor there's nothing left to share. That's the same holding-company shell game workers everywhere are being asked to accept — profits ring-fenced upstream, losses socialized downstream to whoever's still standing on the line.

What matters here isn't the tonnage lost, it's the precedent. The union has already scheduled a second, 120-hour strike beginning October 16 involving 500-plus workers if management doesn't move. A company that spent 58 years selling “harmony” as a brand asset now has a union willing to escalate on a fixed calendar. Every year that passes without concessions moves the fight from symbolic to structural — from a 48-hour warning shot to a strike that actually touches molten steel output. That trajectory, not the September headcount, is what POSCO management should be losing sleep over.

This is also a data point in a wider pattern this year: state-linked and state-adjacent employers across Asian and North American labour markets betting that legacy no-strike norms, holding-company profit shuffles, or sheer institutional inertia will outlast worker patience. It rarely does. Every “first strike in company history” headline is a reminder that industrial peace bought through dictatorship-era discipline has a shelf life, and that shelf life is running out at once, in a lot of places, for the same reason: someone upstream keeps the dividend and tells the shop floor to eat the loss.

Sources

Maeil Business Newspaper (Pulse): POSCO union launches first strike in company's 58-year history
SteelRadar: POSCO wage dispute leads to first strike in company history
Mysteel: POSCO's 48-hour strike, no impact, but a big message
DistantNews: POSCO union launches first strike, saying management shows no will to negotiate
POSCO Holdings Q4 FY2025 earnings call transcript