UAW win helps nonunion workers too as Hyundai, Toyota, Honda hike pay
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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A new video surfacing from a Tesla demonstration in Miami this weekend shows the Optimus humanoid robot taking a nasty fall. But it’s not the fall itself that is raising eyebrows, it’s the specific hand movements the robot made on its way down, which strongly suggest it was mimicking a remote operator frantically removing a VR headset.
Humanoid robots are all the hype right now. Billions in investments are pouring in, and Elon Musk claims it will be a trillion-dollar product for Tesla, justifying its insane valuation.
The idea has been that with the advent of AI, robots in human form could use the new generalized artificial intelligence to replace humans in an increasingly larger number of tasks.
However, there are still many serious concerns about the effort, both at the ethical and technological levels.
Technologically, most humanoid robot demonstrations have relied on remote control by human operators – pointing to a remaining gap between the software and hardware.
We discussed how the robots at the “We, Robot” event were heavily teleoperated, despite Tesla not explicitly disclosing that fact to the public.
That was more than a year ago, and despite claims that Tesla has made “AI demos” of Optimus since, it appears the company still relies on teleoperation to control them during demonstrations.
The Tesla Optimus Miami Incident
This weekend, Tesla held an event called ‘Autonomy Visualized’ at its store in Miami. The goal was to showcase Tesla’s “Autopilot technology and Optimus.”
However, there was nothing “autonomous” at Tesla’s “autonomy” event.
Many Tesla fans were seen posting videos of a Tesla Optimus robot handing out bottles of water at the event. It was also seen posing for pictures and dancing.
On Reddit, someone posted a different video of the demonstration:
As you can see, Tesla Optimus moved its hands too quickly, causing some water bottles to drop to the ground. It then loses its balance and begins to fall backward.
But the most interesting part is that just before falling backward, both of its hands immediately shoot up to its “face” in a distinct grasping motion, as if pulling an object off its head.
The robot, of course, is not wearing anything on its head.
The motion is instantly recognizable to anyone who has used VR or watched teleoperation setups. It appears the human operator, likely located backstage or in a remote facility, removed their headset in the middle of operating the robot for unknown reasons.
Optimus faithfully replicated the motion of removing a non-existent headset as it crashed to the floor.
Here’s a look at how Tesla trained Pptimus with VR headsets in its lab:
Electrek’s Take
This is embarrassing, but not just because the robot fell. Robots fall; that’s part of the R&D process. Boston Dynamics blooper reels are legendary, and they never really eroded the company’s credibility.
The problem here is the “Wizard of Oz” moment.
The specific motion of removing the “phantom headset” destroys the illusion of autonomy Tesla tries so hard to curate.
Even recently, Musk fought back against the notion that Tesla relies on teleoperation for its Optimus demonstration. He specified that a new demo of Optimus doing kung-fu was “AI, not tele-operated”:
Musk said again during Tesla’s last earnings call in October:
“Optimus was at the Tron premiere doing kung fu, just up in the open, with Jared Leto. Nobody was controlling it. It was just doing kung fu with Jared Leto at the Tron Premier. You can see the videos online. The funny thing is, a lot of people walked past it thinking it was just a person.”
Musk keeps telling shareholders that Optimus will be the biggest product in history and that millions of units will be working in factories soon. But if they are still relying on 1:1 teleoperation to hand out water bottles right now, it feels like we are still far away from a useful generalized Optimus robot.
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After images of an the new mid-sized electric crossover were leaked by the Chinese MIIT, Nissan pulled the wraps off its all-new NX8 – and it looks so good, I’m wondering if it couldn’t spearhead the brand’s American turnaround.
Nissan has had a rough go of it in the US, if not, well – everywhere of late. And while we may all have our own ideas about what Nissan needs to do to turn its ship around and get back to its winning ways, one thing just about every auto industry analyst seems to understand is that, at its core, Nissan’s problem is a product problem.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Despite what the optics of cynically slapping a Nissan badge on a decade-old Mitsubishi platform and calling it a new Rogue might have you believe, Nissan happens to have fantastic, modern new products in its production pipeline – including the all-new NX8 BEV and EREV crossover shown here. There’s just one problem: Nissan’s comeback cars are all in China.
The “N” stands for Nice
Dongfeng Nissan, a Chinese-market automotive joint venture between Dongfeng Motor Group and Nissan, has been rolling out hit after hit in recent months, like the N6 (above), which sits between the Altima and Maxima, size-wise, and offers 112 miles on a full charge of its 21.1 kWh LFP battery before its 1.5L gas engine kicks on to keep the odometer rolling.
The N6’s stablemate, the all-electric Dongfeng Nissan N7 sedan, debuted a few months earlier to rave reviews and hot sales, too – moving more than 10,000 units in the model’s first three weeks on the market.
Like its sedan siblings, the all-electric version of Nissan NX8 crossover rolls on an 800V system architecture and features a CATL-sourced LFP battery pack with 5C ultra-fast charging technology (xC is how many you can charge in an hour, effectively, so 60 minutes divided by 5 = it can charge in as little as 12 minutes). That battery reportedly sends power to a single electric motor putting out either 215 kW (~290 hp) or 250 kW (~335 hp), depending on model.
EREV version of the NX8, meanwhile, features a similar setup to the N6, pairing a 1.5L ICE producing 109 kW (~145 hp) with a 195 kW (~260 hp) electric motor. Expect the NX8 EREV to get slightly less than the N6’s claimed 112 miles of electric-only range (Chinese cycle).
The NX8 is expected to reach its first customers in April 2026. Take a look at some of the firs official photos of the new Nissan crossover, below, then let us know how you think this would do in the US in the comments section at the bottom of the page.
Dongfeng Nissan NX8
SOURCE: Dongfeng Nissan, via CNEVPost.
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This week, BYD crossed a major manufacturing milestone as its battery production crossed 113 GWh in the first three quarters of 2025 – but instead of celebrating, the company is doubling down with a new “Zero Defects” initiative to bring battery quality to an even higher level.
CarNewsChina reports that the new “Zero Defects” plan at BYD was launched internally at the start of Q3, with a focus on minimizing manufacturing defects across all stages of the battery’s life, from the manufacturing line to the end user.
The initiative coincides with BYD’s growing role as a battery supplier to other automakers and its expanding battery energy storage system (BESS) business, which are giving BYD both an international footprint and global benchmarks.
In its ongoing bid to prove itself even further in the global battery market, BYD will reportedly emphasize operational efficiency, error reduction, and standardization across manufacturing, process control, and customer service, with the end goal believed to be, “management practices comparable to those of Toyota.”
BYD on a charge
The Chinese automaker seems to be going from strength to strength in 2025, having overtaken EV sales leader Tesla in China back in June and repeating the trick again by overtaking Tesla sales in Europe in August.
Combine those EV sales with the fact that its domestic traction battery production reached 113.42 GWh in just the first three quarters of the year (with 23.65 GWh, or ~20%, being supplied to outside customers – including Tesla), and you might agree that betting against BYD seems to be a bad idea.
Note that BYD has not released official details regarding performance metrics or milestones for its new Zero Defects goal, but the message is clear: BYD plans to keep getting better.
SOURCE: CarNewsChina; images via BYD.
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