In early July, Hyundai proudly showcased its Boston Dynamics Atlas robot kicking a soccer ball in the FIFA World Cup. Now its workers are engaging in a rolling strike aimed at ensuring no human jobs are lost to humanoid robot workers. This is likely the first-ever humanoid robot induced strike, although there are other issues at play in the current union negotiations.
Most of the debates about humanoid robots taking human jobs have, until now, been an argument about the future. A projection of something that might happen eventually, to someone, sometime down the road.
This week about 35,000 Hyundai workers turned that abstraction into a very concrete reality.
The strike impacts Hyundai Motor’s Korean assembly plants that build roughly half the company’s global output. Multiple issues including wages and profit-sharing are on the table, but this dispute also has something new: it is the first auto factory strike explicitly triggered by a plan to put humanoid robots on the line. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first strike anywhere in any industry aimed at preventing humanoids from joining the labor force.
What the workers actually want
The union’s headline demand is pretty clear and blunt: not a single robot enters a Hyundai workplace without a labor-management agreement first.
In January, Boston Dynamics announced the new Atlas, and said that the first year’s production run – “tens of thousands” of robots – would go entirely to Hyundai. Then in May, Hyundai announced that it would deploy more than 25,000 robots in Hyundai and Kia plants, starting in the United States.
No deployment date has been set for Hyundai’s Korean plants at all, so the union is bargaining pre-emptively, trying to lock in protections before the humanoid robots show up rather than after. After all, once the robots are on the production line, it’s not likely they’ll go on strike.
The math recently got much better for the machines
Follow the economics and you understand the challenge facing workers.
Atlas used to cost north of $200,000. Now in early production, units cost an estimated $130,000 to $140,000. But Hyundai projects that figure will fall to roughly $30,000 once cumulative output passes 50,000 units, largely due to almost an order of magnitude simplification in the Atlas build and materials, exclusively reported by Forbes. And the company is planning to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, having committed $26 billion to U.S. operations, including a robotics plant and a Hyundai Mobis actuator facility sized for 350,000 units a year.
Atlas can’t do everything a human can do, but it is one of the most capable humanoid robots on the planet: strong, mobile and connected to factory production management software.
Hyundai, which recently bought the last percentage of Boston Dynamics that it didn’t own, is therefore on track to become potentially both the largest manufacturer and the largest customer of humanoid robots on Earth. (Yes, Tesla would be a contender here too, but its Optimus robot is – at the moment – nowhere near as capable as Atlas.)
A highly capable $30,000 robot that runs three shifts and never files a grievance, wants a pay increase, or needs to retire is pretty appealing from a management perspective.
This will set an important precedent
This strike will cost Hyundai some lost production and some revenue. But the big deal here is the precedent this sets.
Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, BYD and Chery are all pouring money into humanoid and AI-driven automation. GM is already grading suppliers on their level of automation, and recently added 50 “cobots” to a plant where it had just cut more than 1,000 jobs.
Every one of those companies has a union, or a workforce, or a labor ministry that is likely watching what is happening in Korea.
However it turns out, the era of arguing about humanoid robots taking jobs from humans is no longer abstract. The big question now is: how will this all turn out?
I’ve asked Hyundai public relations for a comment, and will update this story as they respond.
