Hyundai workers threaten to strike

HYUNDAI’s unionised workers in South Korea said they may walk off jobs after “no progress” in talks with the nation’s largest automaker.

“The company’s attitude is testing our rationality,” Hwang Ki Tae, spokesman for the Hyundai Motor workers’ union said in an interview in Ulsan, South Korea, on Saturday. “In this situation, our stance is that we may have no choice but to go on strike,” he said.

A workers’ strike in its home market, where Hyundai produces more than a third of its vehicles, would heap pressure on an automaker already struggling with the effects of a strong won eroding profit from exports. It would also represent a changed tactic from union boss Lee Kyung Hoon, whose previous term from 2009-11 was also the company’s longest stretch of uninterrupted production.

The union’s representatives walked out of the last two rounds of wage talks after Hyundai officials tried to talk about the car maker’s demands before negotiating the union’s terms, Mr Hwang said. The next round of talks scheduled for tomorrow will be crucial in determining the union’s decision on whether to strike, he said. Hyundai declined to comment on the likelihood of a strike, in an e-mailed response to a Bloomberg News query.

The union’s demands this year include a 7% or 159,614 won ($157) increase in the average monthly wage, a distribution of 30% of the firm’s net income in bonuses, a limit on working hours to a 52-hour week and for some existing bonuses to be included as regular wages, according to Mr Hwang and the union’s website.

Employees have struck work in all but four years since the union’s formation in 1987, causing estimated lost output exceeding 16-trillion won, the firm said.

Last year, a three-week partial strike over wage terms resulted in an estimated 50,191 vehicles in lost output, equivalent to more than 1-trillion won.