Employees at TSMC began circulating complaints on internal community boards and social media platforms in late May after rumors spread that the company would cut profit-sharing bonuses by roughly 15%, even as Q1 2026 net profit surged 58% year-over-year to NT$572.5 billion (about $17.9 billion) on revenue of NT$1.134 trillion — both record figures that exceeded analyst expectations. Posts on Dcard and private TSMC Facebook communities expressed frustration that “performance is at an all-time high but compensation is actually being reduced,” with some employees explicitly calling for the formation of a union and strike action modeled on Samsung Electronics’ recent labor dispute. TSMC has operated without a labor union since its founding in 1987, leaving workers no formal collective bargaining channel. In response, the company said it expects employee profit-sharing bonuses to grow faster in 2026 than in 2025, and acknowledged it is “fully aware of its growing corporate social responsibility in Taiwan,” according to Digitimes. Analysts attribute the pressure on the bonus pool to TSMC’s $52–56 billion annual capital expenditure program, which encompasses simultaneous construction of 12 new fabs across the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Taiwan for 2nm and 1.4nm capacity.
The timing sharpened the grievance significantly. Samsung Electronics narrowly avoided an 18-day factory shutdown last week by agreeing to allocate 10.5% of its semiconductor division’s operating profit as stock-based bonuses plus 1.5% in cash over a 10-year period — a deal projected to yield average payouts of roughly $340,000 per chip-division employee in 2026. SK Hynix signed a similar 10%-of-operating-profit structure with its union in September 2025. The contrast with TSMC’s situation, where employees have no comparable mechanism, has made the comparison pointed. The average TSMC bonus per employee based on 2025 earnings stood at approximately NT$2.64 million (about $83,000), drawing on a total bonus pool of NT$206.1 billion approved by the board in February. Any disruption to TSMC’s Taiwan operations would carry outsized consequences for the global AI hardware supply chain, as the company is the sole manufacturer of the most advanced chips for Nvidia, Apple, AMD, and others.