"Less Than Half of Retirees Replaced": The Era of Layoffs as Robots Take Over Factories

The automotive industry, which has long been responsible for providing high-income, stable, and quality jobs, is facing a growing sense of employment crisis.

This is because the transition to the era of future mobility, characterized by the introduction of smart factories and AI-powered physical robots, has drastically reduced the number of personnel required in production processes.

As global automakers engage in large-scale restructuring, including layoffs and factory closures, it has been reported that Hyundai Motor Company is also planning to reorganize its workforce structure through the natural attrition of employees due to large-scale mandatory retirements.

According to the Hyundai Motor labor union and other sources, a total of 9,525 production workers belonging to the union are scheduled to reach mandatory retirement age between this year and 2032.

This means that nearly 39% of the current 24,500 unionized production workers will leave the field within the next seven years.

By year, starting with 2,024 retirees this year, there will be 1,706 in 2027 and 1,722 in 2028, with more than 1,000 employees retiring annually until 2030.

Hyundai Motor hired a large number of technical workers from the late 1980s to the early 1990s to coincide with the expansion of the Ulsan plant and the completion of the Asan plant. Now, a "retirement rush" is occurring as the generation hired during that period reaches mandatory retirement age all at once.

However, unlike the manufacturing era of the past, it is reported that the company will not be hiring new production workers to replace those leaving. This is due to the expansion of production process automation and the introduction of physical AI robots, as well as the simplification of production processes as electric vehicles become more prevalent.

A trend is emerging where new hiring is being adjusted to focus on essential job functions.

In fact, the scale of hiring in the open recruitment for production roles, which Hyundai Motor resumed in 2023, has been less than half of the number of retirees occurring each year.

Other global automakers are already undergoing large-scale workforce restructuring. General Motors (GM) in the United States cut 11,000 jobs between 2022 and 2025 and announced an additional reduction of 3,000 in March of this year.

Germany's Volkswagen has agreed with its labor union to cut more than 35,000 jobs at its domestic facilities by 2030, and Japan's Nissan is pursuing a project to reduce its global workforce by 15%, or 20,000 employees.

Analysts suggest this is because, while investment costs are rising due to the shift toward electric vehicles and AI-driven autonomous cars, the need for production workers is decreasing with the introduction of physical AI.

The number of domestic employees at Hyundai Motor, which had been steadily increasing to 75,137 in 2024, fell to 72,598 last year, marking the first decline in five years.

Reported by Kim Minjeong | Video by Hong Jinyoung | Graphics by Yang Hyemin | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.