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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Tesla (TSLA) is not paying its bills, and this has led to at least two small American businesses going bankrupt. The automaker had over $110 million in liens with contractors over the last 5 years.
CNN released a new report that examines lien claims from contractors hired by Elon Musk’s companies in Texas, particularly Tesla.
In Texas, contractors have filed liens for more than $110 million against Tesla in the last five years. Over $24 million is still allegedly owed to dozens of businesses, according to the report.
In two cases, contractors, most often small American businesses, had to file for bankruptcy due to the unpaid bills.
The report highlights the example of a small pipe welding business that landed a multi-million-dollar contract with Tesla to build the Gigafactory Texas in Austin in 2022.
The owner, Jennifer Meissner, dedicated her whole crew to the project for a year, hired more people, and bought new equipment for the project, including some with loans she guaranteed herself:
For the first seven years Meissner’s company was in business, she prided herself on not once being late to pay her workers, she told CNN. After securing the business deal with Tesla in 2022, she said her company’s annual revenue grew exponentially, and she hired even more employees. With business booming, she was also hopeful that she would finally be able to start setting aside money for her special needs daughter, whom she adopted at the age of seven.
Her dream quickly turned into a nightmare when Tesla stopped paying its bills. It started putting incredible pressure on Meissner’s company, leading her to take more loans, thinking that Tesla would eventually pay.
Eventually, it led to her inability to pay her own employees and subcontractors, and ultimately, it contributed to her own bankruptcy.
Tesla ultimately paid $650,000 to cover her subcontractors, but claimed it was “overbilled.”
Another local small business, Full Circle Technologies, found itself in a similar situation after Tesla didn’t pay them $600,000 for installing security systems at the factory:
In bankruptcy filings, Full Circle Technologies said Tesla owed it nearly $600,000 and that it was “forced to take on short term high interest loans to bridge the gap between performing the work for Tesla and the payment for its services.” When a creditor began to levy the company’s bank accounts, the company said it had no option but to file for bankruptcy. Tesla then made its own claim in the bankruptcy hearings, stating Full Circle actually owed the carmaker money for allegedly breaching its contract. The two companies ultimately settled, but Full Circle CEO Abheeshek Sharma told CNN that Tesla was released from its obligation without paying a cent.
Another case involved Sun Coast Resources, a company that delivered fuel to Tesla’s factory, claiming that the automaker wasn’t paying millions in bills.
In this case, Tesla never denied receiving the fuel or subpar service, but it provided a myriad of procedural reasons to explain why it did not pay.
The case was publicized a bit earlier this year, and it was reportedly solved following the publicity.
All these cases are linked to Tesla, but some are pointing out that it is Elon Musk’s modus operandi, as his other companies also have a lot of lien claims against them.
The report found seven companies that filed for bankruptcy after Twitter simply stopped paying their bills after Musk acquired the company.
One of Tesla’s subcontractors said about Musk:
“His goal is to run through everything now – he doesn’t care what or who that impacts – to save the future of the world,” said one entrepreneur about his impression of Musk. He spoke with CNN anonymously and said he remains a fan of Musk but that Tesla has a reputation in Austin of leaving contractors desperate to get paid – noting that his company had to take out extra lines of credit while awaiting payment from Tesla. “Tesla was probably one of the only companies we did business with where it just felt like they absolutely did not care about putting a company out of business.”
In one of the lien cases, Tesla’s own outside counsel agreed that Tesla is not great at paying on time. He said: “I don’t disagree that it does take Tesla some time to pay, that goes for legal bills, too … I know it full well.”
Electrek’s Take
It’s quite something for someone to say that a company “doesn’t care about putting another company out of business by not paying what you owe them” and “I’m still a fan” in the same breath.
The excuse of “saving the future of the world” doesn’t make sense if it also happens to “coincidentally” result in Musk becoming extremely wealthy while his contractors go bankrupt.
If that’s the case, the goal is not saving the future; it’s getting rich.
Regarding the claims in the report, Tesla has a reputation for poor payments. That much is clear when its own outside counsel complains about it in the middle of defending Tesla against claims of not paying its bills.
Some of that is simply due to things slipping between the seat cushions. At any given time, Tesla has about $13 billion in accounts payable.
But it seems to be its way of doing business also because over $100 million in liens in Texas alone is concerning and that’s just for Tesla. Musk has employed a similar approach at other companies, including telling Twitter contractors that they will only pay when forced to.
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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on July 8, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
OpenAI has secured $8.3 billion in new capital as part of its $40 billion fundraise, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
The fresh capital comes as the artificial intelligence company’s business accelerates.
Annual recurring revenue jumped to $13 billion, up from $10 billion in June, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential financial information, and is projected to top $20 billion by year-end.
Paid business users of ChatGPT have climbed to five million from three million just months ago, they said. The round was completed ahead of schedule and was five times oversubscribed.
DealBook was first to report the transaction.
The raise underscores surging investor appetite for AI platforms as competition intensifies among leading model makers.
Dragoneer Investment Group contributed $2.8 billion to the round, the person said, joining Blackstone, TPG, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Altimeter, D1 Capital, Tiger Global, and Thrive Capital.
While Dragoneer was the largest investor in this latest tranche of funding, SoftBank remains the lead backer of the broader $40 billion fundraising effort.
Rivals are also raising massive sums.
Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief competitors, is in talks to secure between $3 billion and $5 billion in new funding led by Iconiq Capital at a potential $170 billion valuation, CNBC confirmed. That follows a $3.5 billion round in March that valued the startup at $61.5 billion.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are courting Middle Eastern capital to finance their ambitions.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently signaled a willingness to reverse his previous stance against Gulf sovereign wealth funds, warning in a leaked memo shared with Wired that it’s become “substantially harder to stay on the frontier” of AI development without tapping that money.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is working with Emirati firm G42 to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi.
WATCH: Anthropic to be valued at $170B in Iconiq-led funding
Hyundai set another US sales record after sales surged 15% in July. The new IONIQ 5 had its best sales month ever as Hyundai’s EV plans begin to unfold.
Hyundai IONIQ 5 sets new US sales record in July 2025
Hyundai sold 79,543 vehicles in the US last month, up 15% from the same period last year. It was also the Korean automaker’s best July sales month since launching its first vehicle in 1986.
The growth was mainly driven by electrified vehicles, including EVs and hybrids (HEVs). Hyundai said that electrified vehicle sales “reached new heights,” after climbing 50% compared to July 2024.
Electrified vehicles accounted for nearly a third (32%) of Hyundai’s retail sales in July 2025, with several popular nameplates setting new all-time monthly sales records, including the new IONIQ 5.
Hyundai IONIQ 5 sales surged 71% in July with 5,818 units sold. Through the first seven months of 2025, Hyundai has now sold nearly 25,000 IONIQ 5 models in the US. Hyundai’s electric SUV remains one of the top-selling EVs in the US, boasting a long driving range, ultra-fast charging capabilities, advanced technology, and a stylish design.
After upgrading it for the 2025 model year, the IONIQ 5 now features a range of up to 318 miles, an upgraded infotainment system, and a built-in NACS port, allowing you to charge at Tesla Superchargers.
The 2025 IONIQ 5 is built at Hyundai’s EV plant in Georgia, alongside the new three-row IONIQ 9. After deliveries kicked off in late May, Hyundai has sold a total of 2,086 IONIQ 9 models in the US, including 1,073 units in July.
Ahead of the upgraded model, IONIQ 6 sales picked up with 949 units sold last month (+22% YOY). Through July, Hyundai sold 7,271 IONIQ 6 models in the US, representing a 5% decrease from the same period last year.
Since both the IONIQ 5 and IONIQ 9 are built in Georgia, they still qualify for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. However, that’s set to expire at the end of September.
Although it will still face billions in extra costs due to tariffs, Hyundai called the new trade agreement between the US and South Korea a “historic win.” Hyundai avoided a 25% tariff, but still faces a 15% rate.
| 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5 Trim | EV Powertrain | Driving Range (miles) | Starting Price* | Monthly lease price July 2025 |
| IONIQ 5 SE RWD Standard Range | 168-horsepower rear motor | 245 | $42,500 | $179 |
| IONIQ 5 SE RWD | 225-horsepower rear motor | 318 | $46,550 | $199 |
| IONIQ 5 SEL RWD | 225-horsepower rear motor | 318 | $49,500 | $209 |
| IONIQ 5 Limited RWD | 225-horsepower rear motor | 318 | $54,200 | $309 |
| IONIQ 5 SE Dual Motor AWD | 320-horsepower dual motor | 290 | $50,050 | $249 |
| IONIQ 5 SEL Dual Motor AWD | 320-horsepower dual motor | 290 | $53,000 | $259 |
| IONIQ 5 XRT Dual Motor AWD | 320 horsepower dual motor | 259 | $55,400 | $359 |
| IONIQ 5 Limited Dual Motor AWD | 320-horsepower dual motor | 269 | $58,100 | $299 |
Hyundai is currently offering some of the best deals on EVs to take advantage of the available incentives. After cutting lease prices again last month, the 2025 IONIQ 5 is now available to lease for as low as $179 per month. The three-row IONIQ 9 is listed for lease at just $419 per month.
Hyundai is also offering a complimentary ChargePoint L2 home EV charger with the purchase or lease of a new 2025 IONIQ 5 or 2026 IONIQ 9.
Want to test one out for yourself? We’re here to help you get started. You can use our links below to find deals on Hyundai’s electric vehicles in your area.
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