As Korea pushes to embed artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics across its factories and offices, the impact on jobs is no longer abstract. Workers are already feeling it. This is the last in a four-part series examining how AI is reshaping work on the ground — the opportunities it creates, the protections it erodes and the rules that unions, employers and policymakers are, or are not, putting in place to govern that transition. — ED.
As artificial intelligence (AI) spreads from coding assistants to factory robots and hiring tools, experts say Korea’s familiar labor disputes over wages and bonuses are giving way to a more existential question: How labor and capital will share the costs and gains of this once-in-a-generation technological shift.
The answer, according to experts interviewed by The Korea Times, is that Korea is not ready. AI has not triggered mass layoffs, but it is quietly sealing off entry-level opportunities, deepening inequality and exposing gaps in the country's legal and training systems. Without a credible safety net and a convincing transition plan, experts warn, blunt protectionism — already visible across many sectors — becomes the rational response to automation for most workers.
“AI has become a survival question for both labor and capital,” said Ahn Jong-ki, a professor at the Korea University Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, noting the nation’s world-leading robot density and recent trials of physical AI on production lines.
Korea already ranks among the most automated manufacturing economies, and companies such as Hyundai Motor are piloting humanoid robots like Atlas alongside existing industrial robots. When Hyundai unveiled Atlas at the CES trade show in Las Vegas earlier this year, the union issued a statement vowing that “not a single robot” would enter plants without its agreement — a sign of how directly workers now perceive these systems as a threat, he said.
“Because AI and robots can touch not only simple tasks but also mid-skill work, unions feel this as an immediate, existential risk,” he said. “If management chiefly focuses on maximum efficiency and rapid substitution, and unions respond only by defending every existing job, the result will be escalating conflict that our current legal framework cannot resolve.”
Ahn stressed that the burden of adjustment does not fall on employers alone. If employees continue to insist every existing job should be frozen in place, they, too, risk losing influence as industries around the world reorganize around AI.
In his view, that “survival pact” must go beyond wages to decide who gets retrained, who is protected and who bears the risks in the AI transition. He argued that Korea now needs new rules on how companies introduce AI, how workers are reskilled and how productivity gains are shared, or today’s quiet adjustments will harden into a new divide between insiders and those shut out of the labor market.
“Both labor and management need to move beyond the principles and red lines they have traditionally defended and make it their central agenda to design new strategies for survival and coexistence in this era of change,” Ahn said. “That is no longer a matter of choice but a necessity.”
The disruption is already showing up most clearly among young and entry-level workers, said No Se-ri, a senior researcher at the state-funded Korea Labor Institute.
Source: Korea Times News
