Hyundai City

Both Hyundai Motor and LG form part of the chaebol, South Korea’s family-controlled industrial conglomerates. The Hyundai Motor Group includes its two flagship automobile makers, Hyundai Motor and Kia Corporation, and about seventy automobile-related affiliates. It is the world’s third-largest auto producer by sales volume. In addition to LG Energy Solution, the LG Group consists of LG Electronics and LG Chem, plus more than fifty affiliates.

In 2024 alone, Hyundai Motor and Kia Corp turned out about 700,000 vehicles at their operations in the United States. The battery project was the result of Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp’s multiyear courtship of an auto conglomerate that was desperate to shift away from its costly and demographically aging home base toward the US market. It committed $26 billion over the next three years, expanding automobile production and building a steel mill to strengthen supply chains as well as a robotics facility (after acquiring Boston Dynamics in 2021).

For more than a decade, the conglomerate benefited from Seoul’s free trade pact with Washington, modeled after NAFTA, which exempted Korean-made automobiles and parts from tariffs. Upon taking office, Trump shredded the pact, slapping a 25 percent tariff on South Korean automobiles. This prompted Hyundai to accelerate its shift of production and supply chains to the American South, in nonunion states like Alabama and Georgia.

There was a long-term rationale behind leaving Ulsan, a company town long known as “Hyundai City,” to wilt away, in much the same way that General Motors hollowed out Detroit forty decades ago. In November last year, Hyundai Motor appointed José Muñoz, a longtime executive of its US operations, as its first non-Korean CEO and president. Observers of the firm saw this as a move that signaled its readiness to pivot production to the United States.

While the ICE raid put the EV battery project in abeyance, it has done little to blunt Hyundai’s US ambitions. In its aftermath, Muñoz declared that Hyundai will produce more than 80 percent of its US-bound vehicles locally by 2030, up from 40 percent at present, and surpassing GM’s 70 percent figure. “This isn’t just about tariff mitigation,” Muñoz stated, “It is about building the most advanced, efficient manufacturing ecosystem in the automotive industry.”

The last time Hyundai Motor Group increased domestic capacity was in 2022 when it added a new EV line to Ulsan. It was the conglomerate’s first home expansion in twenty-nine years. It was also the first time in a decade that the conglomerate hired new blue-collar workers, briefly shifting away from its reliance on contract labor in lieu of regular full-time employees.

Ulsan’s population of about one million people is now below that of Yongin, a booming semiconductor hub in the northwest where national security restrictions on offshoring keep production effectively locked in place. The city is also aging rapidly. By August of this year, about 18 percent of its population were over sixty-five. The union representing Hyundai workers has called on management to raise the retirement age to sixty-four, five years beyond the legal limit.

The raid and tariffs added to the concerns of South Korean labor leaders. Chong Hyewon is the international executive director at the Korean Metal Workers Union (KMWU), which includes the Hyundai labor union. She told Jacobin how Korean business circles have been using the pressure from Trump for their own purposes:

Pro-business media in Korea has been feeding on fears here that US tariff policies — framed as part of a US manufacturing revival — will fuel deindustrialization in Korea. They are calling on labor to align with Korean capital and make concessions “to prevent deindustrialization and protect jobs.” This has created conditions that weaken unity and diminish the will to fight.

Blue-Collar Middle Class

Hyundai Motor’s labor union has previously demonstrated a “will to fight” that led to the kind of higher living standards previously associated with the middle class for its members and much of South Korea’s blue-collar working class, achieved over the course of a single generation. Formed in 1987 amid thousands of wildcat strikes that gave rise to hundreds of independent unions, the Hyundai Motor union has come to symbolize the country’s labor militancy, often grabbing global headlines.

During the period between 1987 and 2018, its members walked off the job every year with just three exceptions, substantially and steadily improving wages and working conditions. By 1996, the average base salary reached about twelve million won ($15,300). This came with a combination of generous benefits and bonuses, both seasonal and performance-related, worth up to 800 percent of base pay. Gains for Hyundai workers were good news for other blue-collar workers, since rival industrial conglomerates had little option but to match (or even surpass) what was won at Hyundai.

In 1997–98, South Korea was mired in the Asian financial meltdown after years of highly leveraged chaebol expansion. The old Hyundai Group splintered into three conglomerates, with the Hyundai Motor Group absorbing the debt-ridden Kia under the government’s restructuring push. The conglomerate wasted no time in exploiting its self-inflicted crisis to roll back hard-won union gains.

In July 1998, union members went on strike against Hyundai’s plan to lay off ten thousand employees. After a thirty-six-day factory occupation, the company accepted a government-brokered deal to lay off 277 and place 1,261 on unpaid leave, only for this deal to be voted down by rank-and-file members. By 1999, 133 laid-off workers had been reinstated, while those on unpaid leave had returned to work.

The union drew criticism at the time for abandoning a demand for the reinstatement of 133 female employees who had been laid off from the company cafeterias. This signaled a post-crisis turn by the union to focus almost exclusively on male full-time employees.

Since then, Hyundai management has stopped hiring regular full-time workers, filling vacancies created by retirement with temporary workers recruited through in-house agencies. By 2024, the union had about 39,000 members, down from its peak of more than 50,000 in the mid ’90s. Contract workers now comprised about one-quarter of the workforce.

To date, the Hyundai union has made no serious effort to recruit temporary coworkers or address their grievances, even though they have been performing the same jobs as full-timers. The result is a two-tier workplace. This year, an average temp worker will earn 54 million won ($38,000), with token benefits to top up this figure, compared with 124 million won ($88,400) in base salary and bonuses plus generous benefits for a regular worker.

A new law, set to take effect next year, will allow these precarious workers to negotiate directly with the contractors — Hyundai and other big manufacturers — that currently rely on agencies to recruit them. This reform comes after nearly three decades of campaigning that deserves an article in its own right.

Grey Area

Most of the South Korean workers that ICE detained had entered the United States under the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). While this visa waiver program is intended for short-stay travelers, in practice businessmen and workers have used it extensively to bypass the labyrinthine work visa process, addressing their urgent entry needs.

Few previously questioned this grey-area practice, which served the interests of US and South Korea business alike. Trump’s ICE nevertheless detained these workers while not apprehending any of the executives who have used the same waiver program.

Hyundai has been replicating the divisive labor tactics from its domestic factories in Georgia. Most of the recently released detainees were temps employed through Hyundai Engineering, an outsourcing affiliate of the Hyundai Motor Group. The company does not disclose their wages, but several online job boards indicate that Hyundai Engineering pays these highly skilled welders and electricians about 56 million won ($40,000) a year.

The workers received housing on top of this sum but no benefits. This amounts to much less than half the pay for their unionized counterparts back home and is also well below the $58,000 annual salary for an average Hyundai blue-collar employee in Georgia. South Korea’s workers’ compensation system will probably reimburse the Korean temps for work-related medical expenses, but any other medical costs they incur while in the United States would fall on them.

All of this points to the urgent need for solidarity between South Korean and US workers employed by Hyundai. In July, the KMWU signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the United Auto Workers (UAW), committing the two unions to “mutual support” in the event of attacks on workers by capital or the state. In response to the raid, the two unions released a joint statement:

The state, having abandoned its obligation to protect human rights, seems now obsessed with “hunting down workers.” At this moment, international solidarity among labor unions is more urgent than ever.

However, legal constraints and other barriers would make it difficult for the unions to transform the nonbinding MOU into a fully enforceable agreement. Jacobin asked Kristyne Peter, the UAW’s international affairs director, whether a move in that direction would be feasible:

I’m not even sure how we would do that legally, taking into account our respective union constitutions. However, there is no limit to what we see as a shared commitment to support each other and push for strong binding legislation and trade agreements that jointly benefits our respective memberships. Now more than ever unions need to build strong ties across borders to take on repressive governments and corporate greed and empower and strengthen the global working class. The KMWU/UAW MOU is a first step to that end.

Daylight Heist

Trump’s assault on South Korean workers had two prongs. Firstly, the ICE raid in Georgia constituted an attack on the working class and immigrants, both at home and in South Korea. Secondly, it coincided with mounting pressure from Trump for South Korea to deposit $350 billion upfront into a special purpose vehicle under his administration’s control to avoid further retaliatory action. The figure is equivalent to more than four-fifths of the country’s foreign reserves.

Trump’s boorish conduct has supplied a rallying point for both left and right in South Korea. Cho Gab-je, a right-wing investigative journalist with fifty years of experience, even called for anti-Trump protests. However, the South Korean state is so entangled with the United States on both economic and military fronts that even the new liberal government of Lee Jae-myung is finding it very difficult to bluntly reject Trump’s outlandish demands.

For now, Lee’s administration seems intent on dragging its feet over negotiations in the hope that it can wait out Trump’s term in office. Yet with so much at stake, the Lee government is likely to capitulate in the end. The real questions are how much damage it will be able to absorb, and how much ordinary South Korean people will be forced to shoulder. For the Left, all of this highlights the urgency of building international solidarity from below.