Hyundai Workers Strike Over Wages and Job Security as Union Demands a Labor Deal Before Atlas Robots Arrive

Overview

Hyundai Motor’s largest labor union staged a three-day partial strike at the automaker’s Ulsan, South Korea complex from July 13 to July 15, with workers on day and night shifts walking off the job two hours early each shift after wage talks broke down, according to Gizmodo and Yahoo Finance. Alongside pay and bonus demands, the union is seeking guarantees that Hyundai will not deploy Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robots on its production lines without a labor-management agreement in place first — a demand that Forbes described as likely making this the first auto-factory strike explicitly triggered by a plan to put humanoid robots on the line.

What We Know

• The strike ran three days, with workers on both day and night shifts leaving two hours early, for a total of four hours of lost production per day, according to Gizmodo and Yahoo Finance.
• The union is demanding a basic monthly salary increase of 149,600 won (about $100), bonus payments equal to 800% of monthly salary, and a retirement age raised from 60 to 65, according to Yahoo Finance.
• Hyundai’s counter-offer included an 89,000 won (about $67) increase to basic monthly salary, an annual performance bonus of up to 350% of monthly salary, an additional bonus of 10 million won, and 15 company shares per worker, according to Yahoo Finance.
• Industry estimates cited by Yahoo Finance put the production loss at roughly 200 billion won, or about 5,000 vehicles; GM Korea workers, also affiliated with the Korean Metal Workers’ Union, separately staged a two-day partial strike that cost eight hours of production.
• Union negotiator Byun Jun-hwan said of the robot question, “We have to prepare to ensure there are safeguards in place,” according to Gizmodo. The union also wants hourly production workers moved to fixed salaries to guard against a potential reduction in work hours brought on by automation, per the same report.
• A union leader said Hyundai and Kia “appear to be planning to replace human workers with new technologies,” according to Benzinga and Gizmodo.
• Roughly 35,000 Hyundai workers took part in the walkout, affecting close to half of the automaker’s global output, according to Forbes.
• Hyundai plans to deploy Atlas at its Metaplant America facility in Georgia starting in 2028, initially for “sequencing” — placing parts in the correct order for assembly — before expanding the robot into component assembly and other manufacturing work by 2030, according to Benzinga and Gizmodo. Hyundai Motor Group intends to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas units across its Hyundai and Kia plants as part of a plan to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, according to Benzinga and Yahoo Finance.
• Atlas can lift 110 pounds and operate between minus 4 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Benzinga and Yahoo Finance, which additionally reports the robot has 56 degrees of freedom, human-scale hands with tactile sensing, and can be retrained for a new task in under a day.
• Robot unit costs are currently estimated at $130,000 to $140,000, down from more than $200,000, and are projected to fall to about $30,000 once cumulative output passes 50,000 units, according to Forbes.
• Days before the strike began, Hyundai agreed to buy SoftBank Group’s remaining roughly 10% stake in Boston Dynamics for about 500 billion won ($335 million), valuing the robotics maker at roughly 5 trillion won ($3.38 billion) and giving Hyundai full control of the company it first took an 80% stake in back in 2021, according to Benzinga.
• The tough negotiating stance comes against a weaker earnings backdrop: Hyundai sold a record 4.1 million vehicles in 2025 but saw net profit fall more than 21% to about $7.1 billion, with fourth-quarter operating profit down nearly 40% year over year, according to Yahoo Finance.
• Samsung avoided a strike in May by paying unionized workers bonuses of almost $400,000 per worker, a precedent the Hyundai union has pointed to in its own demands, according to Gizmodo.

What We Don’t Know

Neither Hyundai nor the union has disclosed a timeline for when, or whether, Atlas robots would be introduced at Korean plants specifically — the only confirmed deployment date so far is the 2028 start at the non-union Georgia Metaplant. It also remains unclear whether the two sides will reach a wage settlement that includes any binding commitment on robot deployment, or how the fresh SoftBank buyout of Boston Dynamics might factor into ongoing talks.

Analysis

The dispute follows Hyundai’s public commitment, previously reported by The Machine Herald, to scale Atlas production to 30,000 units a year as Boston Dynamics shifted from prototype to mass production. That earlier coverage focused on manufacturing capacity; this strike marks the first time the human side of that transition — hours, pay structure, and job security — has stopped an assembly line. Whether the outcome in Ulsan becomes a template for how other automakers negotiate humanoid-robot rollouts with organized labor, or a one-off flashpoint tied to this year’s wage cycle, is not yet resolved.