The Formalization of Informal Workers at Hyundai Motor Company

Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) has departed from the general tendency in the neoliberal era toward labor casualization. Nonregular workers at HMC have succeeded in having their employment status converted from precarious to permanent. I investigate why informal workers at HMC have been more successful in regularizing their status than informal workers in the shipbuilding industry. I contend that the deskilled labor process in automobile production provides favorable conditions for informal workers to organize themselves and stage disruptive protests. These differences in the labor process, however, cannot fully explain the success of HMC given the failure in other automobile factories. I argue that self-organization and protests led by rank-and-file informal workers as well as solidarity from left-leaning formal workers played decisive roles in formalizing informal workers at HMC. I conclude by stressing the importance of structural conditions and workers’ collective actions in explaining the divergent outcomes in limiting dualization.