Thousands of unionized Hyundai auto workers began walking off the job early after negotiations with the South Korean automaker broke down over plans to deploy humanoid robots—the most significant pushback from organized labor so far over the latest wave of robotic automation.
The partial strike at Hyundai’s automotive production complex in the city of Ulsan in South Korea represents “the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Workers have already ended their day and night shifts two hours early at the world’s largest automotive plant from July 13 through July 15, and plan to start staging four-hour strikes from July 20 to 22 after 15 rounds of negotiations failed to reach an agreement, The Korea Times reported.
Union pushback began as soon as Hyundai Motor Group unveiled the latest version of the Atlas humanoid robot, a two-legged robot that stands at more than 6 feet tall and can lift more than 100 pounds, at the start of this year. Atlas is made by Boston Dynamics, the US robotics company that is about to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hyundai.
Hyundai aims to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas robots across various Hyundai and Kia manufacturing plants, according to The Korea Herald. It plans to start with its US factories in 2028 but has not disclosed a timeline for deploying elsewhere.
Each Atlas robot costs an estimated $130,000 but may pay for itself within about two years of operations, according to Samsung Securities Co. analyst Esther Yim in a Bloomberg interview. If the robot cost eventually falls to $100,000, James Hong at Macquarie Securities Korea Ltd. suggested that its operational cost could fall below the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 and significantly undercut a typical auto worker’s salary.
The Hyundai Motor union representing more than 39,000 South Korean workers has responded by demanding that the automaker shift production workers’ hourly pay to a fixed salary to protect against any automation-driven reduction in work hours, along with raising the worker retirement age from 60 to 65, The Wall Street Journal reported. The union has also sought bigger worker bonuses.
Hyundai is just one of many automakers attempting to deploy humanoid robot workers. Tesla is developing its own Optimus robot for use in its electric vehicle factories, and BMW has been running pilot tests with humanoid robots made by Figure AI at its automotive plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Multiple Chinese automotive companies such as leading EV maker BYD are also trying out humanoid robots and sometimes developing their own.
This is also part of a broader automation trend with a long history, given how the global automotive industry has been a leading adopter of industrial robots, such as large robotic arms, for decades. More than 1 million robots were already in automotive factories around the world by 2021 and accounted for one-third of robots across all industries, according to the International Federation of Robotics. The United States had deployed 38,000 industrial robots as of 2025, with the automotive industry alone having installed 13,500 units.
Unlike industrial robots that are usually designed to perform one specific task, some robotics companies are pitching humanoid robots powered by the latest AI models as being capable of eventually doing a wide variety of tasks while fitting more easily into workplaces designed for humans. Such a vision will require overcoming multiple challenges in AI training and hardware development before humanoid robots can become general-purpose robots working autonomously in workplaces or homes.
The test case at Metaplant America
Hyundai plans to first put the Atlas humanoid robot to work at Metaplant America, an electric vehicle factory located outside of Savannah, Georgia, starting in 2028. Hyundai may face less organized pushback on that initial deployment because the US workers at the Georgia factory are not unionized. However, United Auto Workers (UAW), the union representing about 400,000 autoworkers across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, has been attempting to organize workers at Hyundai’s Georgia facility.
Metaplant America is already considered the most heavily automated automotive factory in the United States. The facility has more than 850 robots unloading auto parts, stamping out steel components, putting together car frames, and installing car doors, according to IEEE Spectrum. It also uses 300 automated guided vehicles to carry auto parts to the appropriate work stations while avoiding human workers.
Boston Dynamic’s famed four-legged robot, Spot, has also been deployed onsite to perform “exterior quality inspection” at Metaplant America’s weld shop. During a July 2026 visit to the facility, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter described seeing the Spot “robotic dogs probe their sensor-embedded noses to sniff out defects.”
The Atlas humanoid robots would start out by sorting and organizing automotive parts when they first deploy to Metaplant America in 2028. But Jerald Roach, a general assembly executive at Hyundai’s Metaplant, told The AJC that the humanoid robots won’t pose a threat to the human workforce. Roach described human hands with their sense of feel and touch as being necessary for handling soft car parts such as hoses, wires, carpets, and trim panels.
Hyundai has also committed to employing 8,100 human workers in full-time roles at Metaplant America by 2031 as part of its economic development deal with Georgia. State and local leaders provided the automaker with an incentive package worth an estimated $2.1 billion to set up shop in Georgia. The AJC’s reporting found that Hyundai’s facility already employed more than 3,800 workers by the end of 2025.
But labor unions in both South Korea and the United States clearly want to see stronger commitments from automakers in the face of such automation efforts. The United Auto Workers recently criticized General Motors for installing about 50 new robot arms at the automaker’s flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit after laying off more than 1,300 workers as a supposedly temporary measure.
During the UAW Constitutional Convention held in Detroit in June 2026, UAW President Shawn Fain also warned against “the threat of humanoid robotics and mass automation” undermining worker employment and compensation. The next several years will show whether humanoid robots do indeed prove cost-effective in comparison to their specialized industrial robot counterparts and human workers.
