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 first 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.
In a logistics center attached to one of Korea's biggest auto plants, a robot quietly rolls across the floor, following a digital map to fetch parts that previously were hauled by a human worker. No one negotiated the shift from human labor to robots.
That, says Park Sang-man, head of the Korean Metal Workers' Union (KMWU), is the problem — and it is happening everywhere. His position is simple: "No AI deployment should happen without workers at the table."
Park, who started his three-year term as leader of the country's largest industrial union in January, warned that Korea's push into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is fast becoming a one-way transition, with companies and the government deploying machines far faster than they are writing rules to protect the workers those machines replace.
“If management unilaterally pushes robots and AI without any serious effort at negotiating with the union, I’m opposed to that,” Park said during an interview with The Korea Times last week. “If capital insists on pushing this through unilaterally, you may have to ask whether a Luddite-style movement isn’t exactly what’s needed.”
The former Hyundai Motor shop-floor worker-turned-labor union chief noted the new physical AI boom sweeping Korean manufacturing is driven as much by corporate balance sheets as by the technology itself. Major automotive groups appear to be already rearranging their empires to free up cash for large-scale AI projects, with signs of selling off subsidiaries and other non-core operations.
An Atlas humanoid robot walks while carrying a flat steel plate in its hand in an industrial setting, July 13, 2025. Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group
At this year's CES in Las Vegas, Hyundai Motor Group unveiled a production-ready version of its Atlas humanoid robot, and laid out a plan to mass-produce the machines at its new U.S. plant starting in 2028 for sales and deployment across its assembly lines. The firm is pitching the project as the cornerstone of its physical AI future, in which AI-controlled industrial machines work alongside — or in place of — human workers.
The growing fear, Park says, is that once Atlas reaches mass production, the cost of running a robot for 24 hours a day could undercut the annual cost of employing a human by a wide margin.
“The Atlas demo Hyundai put out (at CES) was targeted very clearly at the sequencing work that Hyundai subcontractors do,” he said. “You could see the robot pulling parts from a rack, packing them into a kit and sending that kit down to the line — exactly the sequencing work that many Hyundai subcontractors do today.”
Source: Korea Times News
