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Hyundai has announced that it will raise factory worker pay by 25% after UAW’s historic strike wins, where it earned 25%+ pay increases at all of the Big Three American automakers. After Toyota and Honda did the same recently, this shows how union wins tend to affect entire industries, raising conditions for even nonunionized companies who have to compete for workers.

The news today comes from AP, who reported Hyundai will increase factory worker pay 25% by 2028. The pay increase roughly matches the increase in base factory worker pay won by UAW in its negotiations, though Hyundai didn’t add any details about additional cost-of-living adjustments or faster progressions to the top wage – two major points of the new UAW contract.

Hyundai COO Jose Munoz said “Hyundai continuously strives to maintain competitive wages and benefits commensurate to industry peers.”

But this isn’t the only similar announcement from a nonunionized company. Last week, Honda raised wages of some workers by 11%, along with a faster progression to the top of the wage scale and additional benefits like child care and student loan help. Honda said it “continuously reviews our total rewards packages to ensure we remain competitive within our industry.” The company also said “we will continue to look for opportunities to ensure that we provide an excellent employment experience for Honda associates.” 

Prior to that, Toyota took the opportunity to hike the pay of most of its US assembly workers by 9.2% immediately after the UAW deals were announced. After Toyota’s pay hike, UAW President Shawn Fain recognized that it was a response to his union’s new contract, saying, “Toyota, if they were doing it out of the kindness of their heart, they could have chosen to do it a year ago.”

Fain called these wage increases the UAW bump and said “UAW, that stands for ‘U Are Welcome’.”

UAW wants to maintain this momentum and has openly stated that it wants to unionize more nonunionized companies in the US. In UAW’s victory announcement, Fain said that it plans to come back to the bargaining table in 2028 on May 1, otherwise known as May Day or International Workers’ Day, but that time, it “won’t just be with a Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six.”

At the time, he didn’t specify who exactly those extra two or three companies would be, but later, plenty of company names have come up. Last week, President Biden said he would support UAW’s push to unionize Tesla and Toyota ahead of a meeting with Fain, with Honda’s pay raise announcement coming right after that well-publicized meeting.

Hyundai has not been mentioned by name yet, but as one of the bestselling auto companies in the US, it could be a natural choice. The company is also a top EV maker, and is charging forward with expanding its EV manufacturing in a time when other companies are waffling.

Electrek’s Take

Unions are having a bit of a moment in the US, reaching their highest popularity ever since surveys started asking about them.

Much of union popularity has been driven by COVID-related disruptions across the economy, with workers becoming unsatisfied due to mistreatment (labeling everyone “essential,” companies ending work-from-home) and with the labor market getting tighter with over 1 million Americans dead from the virus and another 2-4 million (and counting) out of work due to long COVID.

Unions have seized on this dissatisfaction to build momentum in the labor movement, with unions striking successfully across many industries and organizers starting to organize workforces that had previously been nonunion.

Announcements like Hyundai’s, Honda’s, and Toyota’s show how high union membership has a tendency to improve working conditions for every worker and why the US has had gradually lower pay and worse conditions over the decades since union membership peaked. It’s really not hard to see the influence when you plot these trends against each other.

It’s quite clear that lower union membership has resulted in lower inflation-adjusted compensation for workers, even as productivity has skyrocketed. As workers have produced more and more value for their companies, those earnings have gone more and more to their bosses rather than to the workers who produce that value. And it all began in the 80s, around the time of Reagan – a timeline that should be familiar to those who study social ills in America.

Conversely, these two actions show the impact that unionized workers can have not only for their own shops but for nonunionized workplaces as well. If workers gain a big pay increase in one part of an industry, all of a sudden, workers at other companies might start thinking they want to jump ship, maybe move over to another company where they can get better pay or better conditions. To retain workers, companies then need to raise wages.

In addition, nonunionized companies may want to keep their employees nonunionized and thus see the pay raises as a way to satiate their employees into maintaining the status quo. If workers at Toyota see that UAW workers are getting huge pay increases and lots of additional benefits, maybe they’ll think that UAW can bring them the same benefits and start talking about unionizing.

Companies generally think they should avoid having a unionized workforce because a unionized workforce means more pay for workers, which to them means less pay for the executives and shareholders making the decisions. So they’ll offer whatever carrots they can to keep workers from organizing to have their voices heard collectively. Individually, workers have little influence over what their pay and conditions should be.

All of this isn’t just true in the US but also internationally. If you look at other countries with high levels of labor organization, they tend to have more fair wealth distribution across the economy and more ability for workers to get their fair share.

We’re seeing this in Sweden right now, as Tesla workers are striking for better conditions. Since Sweden has a 90% collective bargaining coverage, it tends to have a happy and well-paid workforce, and it seems clear that these two things are correlated. And while that strike is continuing and we haven’t yet seen the effects of it, most observers think that the workers will eventually get what they want since collective bargaining is so strong in that country.

These are all reasons why, as I’ve mentioned in many of these UAW-related articles, I’m pro-union. And I think everyone should be – it only makes sense that people should have their interests collectively represented and that people should be able to join together to support each other and exercise their power collectively instead of individually.

This is precisely what companies do with industry organizations, lobby organizations, chambers of commerce, and so on. And it’s what people do when sorting themselves into local, state, or national governments. So naturally, workers should do the same. It’s just fair.

And it’s clear that it helps – so even if you aren’t unionized yourself or have a job that doesn’t lend well to unionization, you should probably be happy about other union efforts since they tend to buoy entire economies for the people who are creating the value in the first place: the workers.

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CNBC Daily Open: Major U.S. banks enjoy a blowout quarter — assuaging trade war concerns

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CNBC Daily Open: Major U.S. banks enjoy a blowout quarter — assuaging trade war concerns

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent adjusts his glasses during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and President of Argentina Javier Milei in the Cabinet Room at the White House on Oct. 14, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

China has been using its dominance in the rare earth industry to slash prices, driving foreign competitors out, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Wednesday stateside in an exclusive interview. He characterized the country as having “a nonmarket economy.”

In response, the Trump administration will “exercise industrial policy” to set price floors in a range of industries. Price floors are a limit of how low suppliers can charge for goods or services. They are typically set above the market rate and are essentially a form of government price control.

Meanwhile, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley reported blockbuster second-quarter earnings that shot way past analyst expectations. They joined other major U.S. banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, in ihaving a blowout quarter that was turbocharged by robust dealmaking and stock market highs.

And despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued saber-rattling at China on the trade front, traders don’t seem ready to let go of equities. On Wednesday stateside, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rose, and the Russell 2000 hit a fresh record. After all, earnings reports are indicating that the economy isn’t yet faltering, despite firms already experiencing higher costs because of tariffs, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Beige Book.

Whether traders continue pushing equities to new highs amid fractious trade relations with China will depend, in part, on the earnings of major technology companies such as Tesla and Intel due next week.

What you need to know today

And finally…

A Chinese flag flutters on top of the Great Hall of the People ahead of the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum (BRF), to mark 10th anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, in Beijing, China October 18, 2023.

Edgar Su | Reuters

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Trump says Modi assured him India will stop Russian oil purchases, but timeline unclear

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Trump says Modi assured him India will stop Russian oil purchases, but timeline unclear

The India-flagged oil tanker Desh Ujaala is pictured in the Gulf waters near Al-Basrah Oil Terminal (ABOT), about 50 kilometres offshore of Iraq’s southern Faw peninsula, on August 5, 2025.

Hussein Faleh | AFP | Getty Images

U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told him New Delhi will stop buying oil from Russia, though the move will take time.

“[Modi] assured me today that they will not be buying oil from Russia. That’s a big stop.” Trump said at the press briefing in the Oval Office. “Now we’ve got to get China to do the same thing.”

He added that Washington was unhappy with New Delhi’s purchases of Russian crude because it allowed Moscow to continue waging its “ridiculous war” in Ukraine.

However, the U.S. president also said that the halt will not be immediate, and there will be “a little bit of a process,” without giving a clear timeline.

India’s external affairs ministry said Friday that the country’s oil import decisions are driven by efforts to protect consumers by ensuring stable energy prices and securing supplies.

The ministry’s priority was to “safeguard the interests of the Indian consumer in a volatile energy scenario,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement.

He added that India’s import policies are guided “entirely” by that goal.

Jaiswal said that India has sought for years to expand energy trade with the U.S. “This has steadily progressed in the last decade,” he said, adding that “the current Administration has shown interest in deepening energy cooperation with India. Discussions are ongoing.”

India and Russian crude

India’s imports of Russian oil have been a sticking point in the relationship between Washington and New Delhi. Trump slapped additional tariffs of 25% on India back in August, raising the total levy to 50%, while India has called out the U.S. for its trade with Russia.

“If India doesn’t buy [Russian] oil, it makes [ending the war] much easier,” Trump said. “They assured me within a short period of time, they will not be buying oil from Russia, and they will go back to Russia after the war is over.”

On Thursday, Brent crude futures climbed 0.82% to $62.43 a barrel by 10:31 p.m. ET, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures climbed 0.89% to $58.79.

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India is one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil. Data from research firm Kpler shows Russia exports about 3.35 million barrels of crude per day, with India taking about 1.7 million and China 1.1 million.

New Delhi has defended those purchases, with Energy Minister Hardeep Singh Puri telling CNBC in July that New Delhi helped stabilize global energy prices and was encouraged by the U.S. to do so.

“If people or countries had stopped buying at that stage, the price of oil would have gone up to 130 dollars a barrel. That was a situation in which we were advised, including by our friends in the United States, to please buy Russian oil, but within the price cap,” Puri said.

Russian sales of crude oil have been placed under a price cap by the G7 nations and the European Union since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

That price cap, set at $47.6 per barrel, aims to limit Moscow’s revenue from oil exports, constricting the country’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine.

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Kia plans to build 100,000 EV2 and EV4 models a year, far more than expected

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Kia plans to build 100,000 EV2 and EV4 models a year, far more than expected

Kia is about to go on the offensive. The automaker plans to nearly triple electric vehicle production in Europe within the next two years as it introduces the new EV2 and EV4.

Kia doubles down on EV2 and EV4 production plans

With the EV2 and EV4 joining the lineup, Kia will offer an electric vehicle for nearly everyone. The EV2 is Kia’s smallest, most affordable electric car, set to sit below the EV3.

Despite its compact size, Kia said the EV2 will “redefine urban electric mobility” with a flexible interior, its latest connectivity tech, and more.

According to Kia’s CEO, Ho Sung Song, the company plans to build about 100,000 EV2s at its Zilina plant in Slovakia.

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“The average annual production of the upcoming EV2 is expected to reach around 100,000 units at the Zilina plant in Slovakia in 2027,” Song told Automotive News Europe earlier this month.

Kia is also scaling up output of its first electric hatchback, the EV4. By 2027, Kia plans to build over 80,000 EV4s at the Zilina plant. If you add in the EV4 Fastback or sedan models built in Korea, “the EV4’s combined global production is expected to reach approximately 100,000 units,” Kia’s CEO said.

Kia-EV2-EV4
The Kia Concept EV2 at IAA Mobility 2025 in Munich (Source: Kia)

Song explained that Kia aims to produce 100,000 EV2 and EV4 models globally each year, as this volume will be high enough to make them profitable.

The new production target is considerably higher than what Kia Europe CEO Marc Hedrich told Automotive News Europe in August.

Kia-EV4-first-EV-Europe
Kia starts EV4 hatchback production in Europe, its first EV built in Europe (Source: Kia UK)

Hedrich said that combined EV2 and EV4 production could account for 10% and 20% of the output at the Zilina plant in 2026, adding that a production goal of 20,000 to 30,000 EV4s “would certainly make sense” next year.

Officials from Kia Europe explained that production plans shifted after the EV4 received better-than-expected feedback following its launch in August.

Kia-EV4-first-EV-Europe
Kia starts EV4 hatchback production in Europe, its first EV built in Europe (Source: Kia UK)

Kia began EV4 production on August 20, marking a milestone as its first EV built in Europe. Kia is investing €108 million ($125 million) in the Zilina plant to produce the EV2 and EV4. The EV2 will join in 2026.

The facility has the capacity to build 320,000 vehicles, but Kia said output could be expanded to 350,000 with overtime.

Kia-EV3
Kia EV3 Air in Frost Blue (Source: Kia UK)

Kia has yet to reveal final specs, but given the EV3 is about 4,300 mm (169.3″) in length, the EV2 is expected to be slightly smaller at around 4,000 mm (157″). That’s about the size of Hyundai’s entry-level EV, the Inster, at 3,825 mm (150″) in length.

Like the EV9 and recently launched EV5, Kia’s compact electric car features a more upright, crossover-SUV-like design.

Although Kia’s overall sales are down 3% in Europe through August, EV sales are up 56% to 71,179. The EV3 is driving growth as Kia’s second-best-selling vehicle behind the Sportage and as the seventh best-selling EV in Europe. Through the first eight months of 2025, Kia sold 45,269 EV3s in the region.

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