[Edaily Reporter Kim Young-hwan] “Isn’t this just their annual ritual?”

With about a week left before the strike by ready-mix concrete transport operators in the Seoul metropolitan area, I asked an industry insider about the situation, and they responded as if it were no big deal. It seemed they were unfazed, as the pattern of starting a strike every year to raise transport fees has become entrenched.

“They always time the strike for two or three weeks before the rainy season, don’t they? Construction stops anyway when it rains.”

Another insider’s reaction was equally nonchalant. Even with a labor dispute looming—backed by 87.8% of union members in the Seoul metropolitan area—the atmosphere felt more familiar than tense. Concerns that construction of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix factories might be disrupted seemed like someone else’s problem.

The conflict over ready-mix concrete transportation is nothing new. It repeats almost every year, and transportation costs rise almost every year. The reality is that strikes are taking place and transportation costs are rising even though there is little justification for price increases.

Ready-mix concrete is made by blending cement, sand, gravel, water, and naphtha-based admixtures. Since this concrete begins to set if not poured within 90 minutes, transportation is of the utmost importance. This is why rising fuel costs are inevitably a major threat.

However, the manufacturers bear the full burden of the increased costs incurred during this process. When the unit price of ready-mix concrete rises, manufacturers adjust prices through negotiations with construction companies and cover the rising fuel costs for mixer trucks as they occur. Ready-mix concrete transport operators are completely unaffected by these cost fluctuations.

Nevertheless, this “annual event” has even held construction sites for semiconductor factories—a core national industry—hostage. This is because the limited supply of mixer trucks, with only about 26,000 nationwide, has solidified the market structure. The policy governing the supply of mixer trucks has remained an impenetrable fortress for 18 years.

Even national strategic industries—such as advanced semiconductor processes and artificial intelligence, which require investments of hundreds of trillions of won—are ultimately built on concrete. If this concrete supply chain repeats the same conflicts year after year, the problem lies not in the strikes but in the structure of the ready-mix concrete industry.

Thanks to the absolute dominance of mixer trucks, negotiations are likely to reach a settlement again this year. However, that does not mean the problem has been solved. The problem is not the strike itself, but the structural system that inevitably leads to repeated strikes.