The Hyundai Motor union has included a "full monthly salary system" in this year's wage negotiation demands. The content was finalized at an extraordinary delegates' assembly held over two days from the 15th at the Hyundai Motor Culture Center in Buk-gu, Ulsan. Guarantees on employment and working conditions during the introduction of AI were included in the same set of demands. It came up alongside the demand for a wage increase, but its character is different.
A full monthly salary system refers to a method of paying wages as a fixed monthly salary, eliminating allowances that vary each month according to overtime, night work and special shifts. For Hyundai Motor production workers, 30 to 40 percent of annual pay is made up of such variable pay. That means the hours spent working at night and coming in on weekends were income itself. If robots take over those time slots, the amount deposited in the bank account falls even if the worker remains at the plant.
The rest of the demands are not simple either. A monthly base pay increase of 149,600 won excluding the seniority step raise, 30 percent of 2025 net profit as performance pay, and bonuses raised from 750 percent to 800 percent. Items aimed at thickening fixed pay follow one after another.
Behind this is the humanoid robot "Atlas." Regarding this robot unveiled by Hyundai Motor, the union has stated firmly that deployment on domestic lines without labor-management agreement is not possible. The plan announced by the company is deployment at the Georgia plant in the United States in 2029. The union demands that even if automation begins overseas, production volume at domestic plants be protected to guarantee employment for union members.
The counterargument is also clear. Park Ju-geun, head of Leaders Index, said in a phone call on the 17th that there is a self-interested aspect to demanding that the existing wage system be maintained as it is even after robots are brought in. He added that this is a point at which social compromise is needed. Both sides are contesting interpretations of what will happen going forward rather than putting empirical figures forward.
The same debate was held at the National Assembly. At the "AI Transition and the Future of Labor" forum held jointly on the 13th by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and the Democratic Party's Climate, Energy, Environment and Labor Committee, Employment and Labor Minister Kim Young-hoon, Rep. Kim Joo-young, and officials from the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, the Korea Labor Institute, the Korea Enterprises Federation and the Bank of Korea gathered. Woo Sang-beom, a researcher at the Federation of Korean Trade Unions Central Research Institute, cited the backlash surrounding Atlas and said the problem is one-sided implementation that skips discussion of compensation and countermeasures. Park Su-min, associate research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, expressed concern about polarization in which low-skilled and entry-level workers are pushed out while demand grows only for high-skilled workers.
Estimates from international organizations are used to gauge the scale, but their definitions vary. The IMF, in a 2024 report, judged that AI affects about 40 percent of jobs worldwide, and the McKinsey Global Institute projected that up to 300 million jobs could be subject to automation by 2030. Research stating that 14 percent will disappear entirely and more than 30 percent will be partially replaced is also cited. Impact, disappearance and transition are mixed together, making it difficult to bind them by a single standard.
Institutional responses are moving slowly. OpenAI proposed a robot tax and a four-day workweek in its report "Industrial Policy for the Age of Intelligence," and the EU chose a digital tax targeting big tech instead of a robot tax. Korea's four major insurance schemes, made up of the national pension, health insurance, employment insurance and industrial accident insurance, use wages and employment as their assessment base. It is a design in which insurance premium revenue falls along with the wages people receive.
The schedule for the opening negotiation meeting has not been set, and no answer has emerged on how the company will respond to the demands. What is clear is that these talks will not end at a few percentage points of wage increase. Work to rewrite from the beginning the calculation of what will fill the monthly pay of workers who have handed night shifts and weekend work over to machines has begun in Ulsan. What the next generation's pay statement will look like is decided here.
