Rejecting Overtime Work
Hyundai Motor’s labor union has decided to resume wage negotiations with the management. The labor union made the decision at a dispute committee meeting on July 5. It plans to continue negotiations and working-level consultations until July 13.
When the negotiations end on July 13, the labor union will hold the second dispute committee meeting. If wage talks fail to produced an agreement by July 13, the union is likely to set a labor struggle schedule. It has decided to reject overtime work from July 9.
Earlier, the union began negotiations with the management, demanding an increase of 165,200 won (excluding salary raises by seniority) in the basic salary, payment of 30 percent of net profit as a performance-based bonus, the abolition of the wage peak system, the construction of a new electric vehicle plant in Korea and the extension of the company’s retirement age and new employee recruitment. Hyundai Motor, however, said it would be difficult to accept the labor union’s demands due to internal and external uncertainties.
Hyundai Motor’s labor union declared a breakdown in negotiations with management on July 23rd of last month and filed an application for dispute settlement with the Central Labor Relations Commission. On July 28th, the National Labor Relations Commission unanimously passed a resolution on the occurrence of disputes and secured the right to strike after the decision to suspend negotiations the previous day.
Hyundai Motor’s labor union has not staged a strike for the past three years, but it had staged a strike for seven consecutive years from 2012 to 2018, when a hard-line leadership came to power at the labor union. Ahn Hyun-ho, the current head of Hyundai Motor’s labor union, is a former member of the Metal Workers’ Union, an in-house organization of Hyundai Motor classified as a hard-line group. Ahn is likely to lead the labor union to going on strike because he led a general strike by unionized Hyundai Motor workers as the chairman of the Hyundai Precision labor union during laborers’ struggle against layoffs by Hyundai Motor in 1998.
Insiders of the automobile industry are concerned that Hyundai Motor will suffer an increase in losses if the labor unions go on strike at a time when production has declined due to global supply shortages such as a shortage of automotive chips that have continued since last year. Hyundai’s global sales in the first half of this year fell 7.6 percent year-on-year to 2,031,185 units. The automaker’s sales shrank by 13.4 percent at home and by 6.2 percent abroad.