Workers at South Korea's largest carmaker Hyundai Motor have voted to go on strike this week, a company spokesman said Saturday.
Almost two-thirds of Hyundai's 44,800-strong union voted to authorise a strike as early as Tuesday after 50 days of negotiations broke down.
The union is seeking an 8.9 percent pay increase, an extension of the retirement age from 58 to 60 and a halt to the allocation of work to overseas plants — demands that management say are “unacceptable.”
Hyundai Motor president Yoon Yeo-Cheol has urged workers to drop “excessive demands which have undermined competitiveness” of the world's sixth largest auto company.
The union has already gone on strike twice so far this year, first over a disputed bonus in January and again in June to protest the signing of the US-South Korea free trade agremeent.
Not a year has passed without a strike since the union was formed in 1987 in the wake of a pro-democracy popular uprising.
Strikes at Hyundai Motor last year alone cost the company 115,683 vehicles worth 1.6 trillion won (1.7 billion dollars).
