Georgia Battery Plant Raid Spotlights Hyundai’s Horrible Labor Practices

Four hundred and seventy-five workers were arrested at a joint Hyundai and LG Energy Solutions electric-vehicle battery plant under construction in Ellabell, Georgia, on September 4. It was the largest immigration raid at a single location in U.S. history.

The detained workers, most of whom were employed by subcontractors, were shackled with chains around their hands, ankles, and waists in a video released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. LG said 47 of its employees were also detained.

The workers were building a sprawling $7.6 billion taxpayer-subsidized manufacturing facility, touted as the largest economic development project in Georgia’s history.

The raid was “part of a dangerous, escalating pattern of government agencies arresting people at schools, neighborhoods, airports, and workplaces with growing impunity all over the U.S.,” said Migrant Equity Southeast, a local immigrant rights organization.

SPOTLIGHT ON HYUNDAI

The raids at Hyundai throw into sharp relief the impunity of President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown. They also shine a spotlight on Hyundai’s employment and labor practices, including hiring workers on short-term visitor visas that prohibit working in the U.S.

Many companies have used these and other inappropriate visas to exploit vulnerable workers. Korean manufacturers have also used them to build their facilities.

“It is standard industry practice to send experts from another country to set up and install new high-tech equipment,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “It is especially common when the equipment has patents or other sensitive information like battery cells for electric vehicles.”

South Korean officials say the U.S. has placed companies in an “impossible position” by demanding that they invest more in American manufacturing facilities while denying short-term working visas needed to finish jobs on time.

“The U.S. government is two-faced,” Chang Sang-sik, head of research at the Korea International Trade Association, told the Financial Times. “It is asking Korea to invest more in the U.S., while treating Korean workers like criminals even when it is well aware that they are needed for these projects to happen.”

An auto worker at Hyundai's Montgomery assembly plant, who asked to be anonymous, commented, “I know that Hyundai Montgomery uses only Korean contractors, and that’s for a reason. Why can’t the company hire local union workers to build the plant and keep workers safe?”

Hyundai already has a terrible safety record and a history of evading unions, racial discrimination, and employing children at its factories and suppliers.

“Unfortunately, the militarized federal crackdown on these workers further hurts safety at Hyundai,” said the United Auto Workers in a statement. “Workers are not the problem. Exploitative corporations are. The UAW will always stand with all workers—immigrant and native-born alike—against unsafe corporations and militarized attacks on our workplaces.”

MANUFACTURING INVESTMENTS

An estimated 300 of the detained workers were Korean nationals on visas. South Korea has chartered a plane to bring the workers home.

Since the mid-2000s, the UAW has been trying to organize the big Korean auto manufacturers in the South, where they located plants to avoid unions and cut corners on safety. Korean companies have also brought scores of suppliers to the U.S. to build a regional supply chain via Interstate 65 from Alabama to Georgia, as Timothy Minchin chronicles in his book America’s Other Automakers.

The Japanese Big Three—Honda, Nissan, and Toyota—aggressively built out their U.S. manufacturing footprint only after establishing a strong market position in the U.S. But Hyundai and Kia muscled their way into the auto industry by making big bets on building U.S.-based plants first, Minchin writes.

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Hyundai built its first plant in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2005. Beginning in 2006, under then UAW President Bob King, the union tried to mount an organizing drive there. It was unsuccessful.

Under current President Shawn Fain, the UAW has made some inroads at the facility, which includes a 3.2-million-square-foot assembly plant, stamping facility, paint works, two engine shops, and test track. After the upswell of excitement following the 2023 Stand-Up Strike against the Big 3 automakers, Hyundai workers reached 30 percent on signed cards last February, but the organizing momentum has stalled since.

Kia Motors, whose largest shareholder is Hyundai, built its first manufacturing plant in West Point, Georgia, in 2010. By 2017, Korean auto suppliers in the state employed an additional 7,000 workers.

DODGING UNIONS

One thing South Korea wasn’t willing to bring to the U.S. was the militant trade unionism the country is known for. Korean auto workers founded the Hyundai Motor Workers’ Union in 1987; it became famous for annual strikes.

In 1991, Hyundai workers struck after managers refused to give employees a bonus. Workers didn’t complain. They seized the factory, evicted managers, and smashed up over 2,000 cars.

In the wake of the strike, the company signed an industrial peace accord in 1995. But the tradition of militant strikes continues.

Strikes cost the company $554 million in lost production in 2001. And just when Kia was looking for a U.S. site in 2005, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (with 27,000 members at Kia and 42,000 at Hyundai) struck for wage increases and bonus payments.

“In South Korea, labor strife in auto plants, often violent, is as routine as the daily lunch break,” quipped one reporter.

Hyundai has fought efforts to unionize its U.S. plants. In 2010, when the Korean automaker Kia was siting its first U.S. plant in Georgia, company managers mused about whether Black workers could be paid less than their white counterparts. “They would ask us, ‘Do we have to hire Black people, or do we have to pay Black people the same?’” recalled Ray Coulombe, economic development manager for Georgia. Nevertheless, Kia ended up hiring many African American workers, perhaps to avoid Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges of discrimination in a county with a large Black population.

However, Kia did screen out former UAW members. When laid-off workers from Ford and GM plants in Atlanta applied for the jobs, they got no callbacks. An official at the Georgia Department of Labor admitted to a local paper that it was because “Kia runs a nonunion assembly plant.”

UNION CONTRACT

“When workers are put in danger by predatory companies like Hyundai, there is an opportunity for a constructive response from the federal government: OSHA and the NLRB have tools at their disposal to increase workplace safety,” the UAW said in a statement.

Other joint ventures involving LG have also had issues with safety. A Korean contract worker at the Ultium Cells battery plant, a joint venture between GM and LG, was crushed by a machine in 2022. The impetus for workers at Ultium Cells to fight for a first contract stemmed from chemical leaks, fires, and accidents.

The same was true at the BlueOval SK Battery Park, a joint venture in Kentucky between Ford and South Korea’s SK On, where battery workers organizing with the UAW won a contested election in a narrow vote in August in a campaign powered by health and safety concerns.

At Hyundai’s Georgia complex, three workers have already died in the buildout of the factory. Will that be a motivation for those hired once the building is done to seek the safety and protection of a union contract?