Hyundai workers are rallying against robot replacement. It could be a sign of things to come.
What happened: Workers at Hyundai’s main production hub in South Korea have made an auto industry first: going on strike over humanoid robots. While the company hasn’t yet rolled out humanoids on the assembly line, it plans to soon, and so the union has launched a partial strike to secure pre-emptive job protections and other labour and wage guarantees.
The looming humanoid in question is Atlas — a six-foot-two fully-electric robo-hunk that can move autonomously and lift up to 110 pounds. The bot is made by Boston Dynamics, the robot pioneer that Hyundai acquired outright earlier this year.
Why it matters: It’s unlikely this will be the last strike of its kind. The auto industry will be one of the sectors most impacted by the roll-out of humanoid robots. Many major automakers already have humanoid robot plans in place, which has naturally stirred job replacement fears.
The party line has been that these robots are meant to fill labour gaps and alleviate the most dangerous and strenuous work from human labourers… but let’s be real.
In Canada: In February, Toyota announced it would be the first automaker in Canada to use humanoids at an assembly plant, employing seven Digit bots from Agility Robotics at its Woodstock, Ontario, facility. As of April, three of these bots were hard at work feeding auto parts to the assembly line.—QH
