Hyundai Motor Group plans to deploy more than 25,000 Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid robots at Hyundai and Kia plants. The workers are not so happy with the plan.
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In early July, Hyundai proudly is shown off Boston Dynamics Atlas robot kicking a soccer ball in the FIFA World Cup. Now its workers are engaged in a rolling strike with the aim of ensuring that human jobs are not lost to humanoid robot workers. This is likely the first strike caused by a humanoid robot, although there are other issues at play in the current union negotiations.
Most of the talk about humanoid robots taking over human jobs has, until now, been an argument about the future. A projection of something that might eventually happen, to someone, sometime down the road.
This week, some 35,000 Hyundai workers turned that abstraction into a very concrete reality.
The strike affects Hyundai Motor’s assembly plants in Korea that produce about half of the company’s global output. Many issues, including wages and profit sharing, are on the table, but this dispute also has something new: It’s the first auto factory strike to be explicitly sparked by a plan to put humanoid robots on the line. As far as I know, it’s the first strike anywhere in any industry aimed at preventing humanoids from entering the workforce.
What employees really want
The union’s basic demand is quite clear and straightforward: not a single robot enters a Hyundai workplace without first entering into a labor-management agreement.
In January, Boston Dynamics announced the new Atlas and said the first year’s production – “tens of thousands” of robots – would go entirely to Hyundai. After May, Hyundai was announced that it will deploy more than 25,000 robots in Hyundai and Kia factories, starting in the United States.
No installation date has been set at all for Hyundai’s factories in Korea, so the union is negotiating proactively, trying to lock in safeguards before the humanoid robots appear, not after. After all, once the robots are on the production line, they are not likely to go on strike.
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The Atlas cost north of $200,000. Now in early production, the units cost around $130,000 to $140,000. But Hyundai predicts that figure will drop to about $30,000 when total production exceeds 50,000 units, largely due to nearly an order of magnitude simplification in Atlas manufacturing and materials, Forbes reports exclusively. And the company plans to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, having committed $26 billion in U.S. operations, including a robotics factory and a 350,000-unit-a-year Hyundai Mobis actuator facility.
Atlas can’t do everything a human can do, but it’s one of the most capable humanoid robots on the planet: powerful, mobile and connected to factory production management software.
Hyundai, which recently bought the last stake in Boston Dynamics it didn’t own, is therefore well on its way to potentially becoming the largest manufacturer as well and the largest customer of humanoid robots on Earth. (Yes, Tesla would be a contender here, too, but its Optimus robot isn’t – for now – as capable as Atlas.)
A highly capable $30,000 robot that runs three shifts and never complains, wants a raise, or needs to retire is attractive enough from a management perspective.
This will set an important precedent
This strike will cost Hyundai some lost production and some revenue. But the big issue here is the precedent it sets.
Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, BYD and Chery are pouring money into humanoid and AI-based automation. GM already is supplier rating on their level of automation, and recently added 50 “cobots” to a factory where it had just cut more than 1,000 jobs.
Each of these companies has a union, labor force, or labor ministry that likely monitors what’s going on in Korea.
But as it turns out, the era of controversy over humanoid robots taking jobs from people is no longer abstract. The big question now is: how will this all play out?
I’ve reached out to Hyundai PR for comment and will update this story as they respond.
