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As demands for performance bonuses tied to a fixed percentage of operating or net profit spread among major conglomerate unions, the Korea Employers Federation has released a report analyzing Toyota Motor's labor-management council as a counterexample, criticizing the country's labor culture of distributive bargaining.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the Korea Employers Federation published a report titled "Implications of Toyota's Labor-Management Relations," highlighting key remarks made by the union side at Toyota's labor-management council this year. The federation cited Toyota's in-house media outlet, Toyota Times.
"Toyota's union, driven by an urgent recognition that it cannot survive on past success formulas and widespread complacency, proactively charted the direction of change," the federation said. "This offers important lessons for Korea's labor-management reality, which remains trapped in distributive bargaining."
According to the report, union chairman Keisuke Kito said at the first through fourth council sessions that "if we continue the way we have, fixed costs will only keep rising." He added that he would "break free from conventional thinking and uniform mindsets, and review without exception anything that stands in the way of transformation."
"Rather than waiting on the company or blaming others, we must move on our own," Kito said. "We will constantly ask ourselves how Toyota's 'common sense' compares with the outside world, whether there is more we can do, and turn what is in the negative into zero and then into a positive."
Deputy union chairman Daiki Akiyama, addressing the shift to AI, said workers "must ask themselves what skills they can offer and what their added value is, and face the challenge with the resolve to reinvent everything from scratch."
Toyota Executive Vice President Yoichi Miyazaki responded in kind, saying, "What we are doing is not 'shunto' — the annual spring wage battle — but 'shunko,' where labor and management share challenges, engage in thorough dialogue, and push through together."
Lee Dong-geun, KEF's standing vice chairman, said it was "highly instructive for Korea's labor-management relations that the union of a company leading the global automaker industry by an overwhelming margin in both sales and operating profit has resolved to think about survival strategies and move first."
Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics and its union reached a tentative wage agreement for 2026 on May 27 under mediation by the Ministry of Employment and Labor. The deal centers on a 4.1 percent annual salary increase and the introduction of a new special performance bonus for the semiconductor (DS) division, and also includes a broader overhaul of the performance bonus system.
rainbow@heraldcorp.com
