Ships are under construction at Hanwha Ocean's shipyard on Geoje Island, South Gyeongsang Province, Nov. 27, 2025. Yonhap
Unionized subcontracted workers at Hanwha Ocean’s Geoje shipyard in South Gyeongsang Province have denounced the company, accusing it of breaking a promise to align the ratio of subcontracted workers’ performance-based bonuses to their base salaries with that of the company’s direct employees — a pledge praised by President Lee Jae Myung in December.
After Hanwha Ocean distributed performance-based bonuses ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, the workers claimed the company had continued to discriminate against them.
“Unlike direct employees, whose length of service did not affect the ratio of their performance-based bonuses to base pay, the ratio for subcontracted workers varied depending on how many years they had worked at the shipyard,” the workers said in a statement Thursday.
“Each of the 4,000 migrant subcontracted workers received a performance-based bonus equal to 46.8 percent of what Korean subcontracted workers with the same tenure received.”
The union also said that employees of Welliv, the unit managing cafeterias and other amenities at the shipyard, did not receive any performance-based bonuses because the company is not classified as an “in-house” subcontractor.
In response, Hanwha Ocean said it lacked the authority to interfere with each subcontractor’s decision on bonus allocation.
“The amount we provided to each subcontractor was sufficient for them to match the ratio of subcontracted workers’ performance-based bonuses to their base wages with that of our direct employees,” a Hanwha Ocean official said. “Even non-Korean employees hired directly by our company receive smaller performance-based bonuses than their Korean peers with the same years of service.”
Hanwha Ocean’s explanation, however, is unlikely to ease the controversy, given that the company’s earlier pledge to end discrimination in bonus payments had prompted politicians to urge other shipbuilders to follow suit.
Some industry watchers even speculated that the president’s praise for Hanwha Ocean influenced the Defense Acquisition Program Administration’s decision to let the company bid for a 7.8 trillion won ($5.3 billion) project to build next-generation destroyers for the Navy — a break from the past practice of granting a sole-source contract to the firm that developed the basic design. HD Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), Hanwha Ocean’s main rival, drafted the destroyers’ basic design.
Source: Korea Times News
