Hyundai Motor Co. workers began a three-day partial strike on Monday as their union demands bigger bonuses following landmark deals at semiconductor companies, and seek guarantees jobs won’t be lost to AI and robots.
Production workers at South Korea’s largest carmaker will walk off the job two hours ahead of their scheduled shift end through Wednesday, after last week’s wage talks ended without an agreement. Union leaders plans to reconvene Thursday to discuss their next steps, while continuing backroom negotiations.
The key sticking point in this year’s talks centers on the union’s decades-long push to secure a performance bonus tied to 30% of the previous year’s consolidated net profit. Long dismissed as an opening bargaining chip, the demand has gained traction after tech giants Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. recently gave chips workers massive bonuses to share in the windfall profits the companies are generating from the artificial intelligence boom.
Hyundai Motor workers are also on the frontline of automation and the rise of humanoid robots, with the automaker planning to deploy its Atlas humanoid in factories for high-volume, repetitive tasks, such as kitting vehicle components in 2028 in the US, before plugging them into more complex assembly work by 2030.
The union is pushing management to guarantee income security through formal negotiations before any deployment of Atlas robots, and a full monthly salary system to insulate fixed incomes from an automation-driven drop in human labor hours. They also want the retirement age extended to 65 from 60 to allow them to work longer.
Beyond the baseline payouts, the union is demanding an increase in regular bonuses to 800% from 750% of monthly pay and a base pay increase of 149,600 won ($100).
During last week’s talks, Hyundai offered an 89,000 won base-pay increase, a lump-sum performance bonus of 350% plus 10 million won and 15 shares in the company. The union rejected the proposal, saying it fell short of expectations.
Production Losses
The work stoppage could incur losses of more than 18.7 billion won per hour, according to Yonhap News. During a similar rolling strike last year, 16 hours of partial walkouts resulted in an estimated production shortfall of roughly 7,000 vehicles, costing the company more than 300 billion won in lost revenue based on average vehicle prices.
The three-day disruption carries outsized weight as South Korea remains the logistical anchor of Hyundai’s manufacturing network, accounting for nearly half its annual global sales volume. With more than 1 million locally built cars designated for export each year, any prolonged bottleneck at home might quickly squeeze the company’s supply chains and dealership inventories globally.
Hyundai didn’t comment on the strike’s immediate impact, but Choi Yeong Il, head of domestic production, called some of the worker’s demands unreasonable and warned against using industrial action to enforce profit demands.
“Past strikes have yielded nothing but irreversible production losses, lost wages and harsh criticism from our customers and the public,” he said in a statement Friday, adding the company won’t make concessions or compensate for lost wages because of a strike.
Bloomberg
