Hyundai Strike Ends While Car Shortage Starts

by Bertel Schmitt

August 30th, 2012 7:54 AM

hyundai strike ends while car shortage starts

Hyundais will be in short supply this coming month. Workers in Korea refused to make them and went on strike in July and August. Hyundai and the unions reached a tentative wage deal today, “ending the second-costliest strike in the firm’s 45-year history,” as Reuters reports.

Yesterday, a company executive told Reuters that Hyundai could miss its overseas sales target for September because fewer vehicles were shipped in August. Hyundai’s U.S. vehicle exports from South Korea dropped by a quarter in July from June.

The wage deal includes a 5.4 percent rise in basic salaries, a bonus equivalent to five months’ salary plus a 9.6 million Korean won ($8,500) payment for each worker. Most importantly, it was agreed to scrap the overnight shift at South Korean factories from March 2013. Hyundai will shorten working hours and introduce two shifts of eight hours and nine hours apiece instead of the current two

An end to the overnight shift also was at the center of union demands a GM’s Korean factory. Under the GM deal, a new shift scheme in will be tested in the first quarter of 2013.

Hyundai’s union members will vote on the wage agreement on Monday.

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8 comments

Detroit-X on Aug 30, 2012

Right or wrong, good or bad, I feel some amount of satisfaction that there is a union in these "other" countries, jacking around the pompous execs, for good or ill, and reducing advantages to manufacturing overseas. What a world, what a world.

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- Don1967 on Aug 30, 2012
  
  No question it helps level the playing field with Detroit. But on a global scale I find little to cheer about when unions win. As nice as it is to see the little guy get more money for less work, in the long run this is a slippery slope to economic ruin, which affects everybody. It certainly hasn't helped anyone in Detroit.
  
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- SCE to AUX on Aug 30, 2012
  
  Typical union mentality - taking joy in seeing your employer suffer, thinking that somehow it benefits the employee. You do not enrich the poor man by making the rich man poor. No wonder Hyundai's US plants aren't unionized.
  
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- -Cole- on Aug 30, 2012
  
  @SCE to AUX Where's the schadenfreud? I don't see it. Don't you know the Hyundai plant refused the UAW? What does this have to do with that? "You do not enrich the poor man by making the rich man poor." Great minds...
  
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- Bd2 on Aug 30, 2012
  
  @don1967 As opposed to CEOs (esp. American CEOs) taking home compensation packages many times more than what their predecessors received during the 1970s-1980s? And even those that do a crappy job get immense golden parachutes (see Bob Nardelli's $210 severance package from Home Depot). That $$ taken from the shareholders (that doesn'e even include all the rash of CEOs who used their companies as a personal bank - Tyco, Worldcom, Adelphia, Qwest, HealthSouth, etc.) And what actually does lead to economic ruin is the banks and finance sector leveraging themselves to the hilt and playing Casino or engaging in "legal" Ponzi schemes. S&L crisis dot.com bubble and crash Enron manipulating energy markets subprime/derivatives bubble and crash the immense amount ofspeculators in oil and other commodities futures markets
  
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- Bd2 on Aug 30, 2012
  
  @SCE to AUX Methinks Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group, Chung, doesn't suffer at all.
  
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El scotto on Aug 30, 2012

I love the irony of union bashing on the eve of Labor Day weekend.

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Signal11 on Aug 30, 2012

A part of me says this is collusion between Hyundai execs and the union bosses to drive the price of Sonatas higher. Shortcut to going upmarket the slow way.

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