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South Koreans feel betrayed by workforce detentions at Georgia Hyundai plant
97 paulpauper 111 9/9/2025, 4:05:54 PM apnews.com ↗
Specialized foreign workers were brought in for repair and specialized work. Korean immigrants are able to come in on ESTA visas for 90 days. No issue there. Labor union claimed the workers were doing union non-specialized work and this broke their visa grants.
Suppose that the plant made special workers do non-special work, the hammer does not fall on the workers. It falls on the plant. Yet ICE was brought in to hammer the workers. This is a big screw up in the legal procedures department.
I don't criticize anyone but this administration is a hot mess. And too arrogant to admit it.
And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it.
While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.
The company gave up and decided to just sell their product without any services - like having the customer do all the work themselves. It was very inefficient because they had to train their customer’s workers and put together huge amounts of documentation and there were a lot of issues making it work. But the company was able to charge for all of that and basically ended up having the same profit margin anyways. In the end the only person paying the cost was the customer, since they had to deal with work getting done more slowly due to the overhead of training people and a lot of (billed) back-and-forth communication.
What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?
So paying a union person isn't a tax, any more than paying anyone else. Everything is government mandated or regulated. Is paying interest to Chase Bank a tax? They're federally chartered, and I can't set up my own bank, I'm forced to use a regulated entity.
On the same software who's only difference was that it had a different icon color.
Wrong. ESTA is not a visa, it's a requirement for all travelers to US.
The visa-waiver program (VWP) doesn't include the right to work. You need to have an appropriate visa if you're being paid (or given material benefits) while travelling in US.
Things like interviews or conferences or workshops are not included in the right to work requirement.
So if hookers are working the streets, the hammer does not fall on them and will fall on their pimp instead? The cops will just let them go?
The law does not work the way you think it does.
Same thing happened with Trump in the hush money scandal. The guy who transferred the money (the lawyer) was at fault. The only reason by which they came after trump was that the books did not record the transfer truthfully, and did so falsely.
The Asian high tech companies have a history of falsely claiming US workers just aren’t smart enough to do the job when in fact what they really want is to have their own workers come in and work triple overtime at slave wages. It was a huge issue with the TSMC build in Arizona.
If they brought people in to do construction work on either tourist visas or B1 meeting type visas that’s illegal and should be and what happened here makes perfect sense.
Of course enforcing pro-labor laws against multinationals isn’t exactly what this admin is known for, so it’s probably a fuck up. But until we know the details we don’t know.
It is pretty obvious now that the Korean sub-contractors thought they were above board on the proper visas for the consulting work that was being contracted. Now, whether that was actually true or not will take a few years of litigation to figure out, since visa law is complicated. If they were doing custom specialized work (that is definitely allowed by ESTA/B1), then the visas were correct. If they were hammering nails into wood, then the visas were incorrect. See https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyund...
Not only that there's a long history of asian high tech conglomerates taking shortcuts on these kinds of projects:
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-06-22-tsmc-semiconductor-fac...
Including this specific one:
https://www.enr.com/articles/60802-third-fatality-recorded-a...
So maybe, maybe not. The fact that the attorneys for the accused deny it isn't exactly dispositive.
I'm also pretty sure we are screwed in manufacturing because our labor is just too expensive and unskilled/unproductive to justify the price. But that is another issue entirely.
They prefer to setup factories overseas because they like paying lower wages.
Productivity in the US is incredibly high. Our decision to allow manufacturing to be shipped overseas is a political one.
We don’t have to care what companies feel like doing. We have the customers and the money. We can insist.
You are using “euphemism” as a euphemism for “dysphemism”. (Or, more likely, just using the wrong word; I doubt you are really intentionally trying to put a positive spin on it.)
Your boss telling you to violate the terms of your visa doesn't mean you get to do that. They violated their visas, so they get kicked out.
An ESTA or B1 visa lets you attend business meetings. How do you draw the line between “work” and “meeting”?
A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa?
That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted.
- - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184501
This is a construction site. Do you have a tool in your hand? Then you’re not in a fucking meeting. This isn’t that complicated.
> A sibling comment to yours [1] describes a situation where moving office chairs from one meeting room to another was considered union work. How are Korean experts supposed to know you shouldn’t do that when attending a meeting or you risk being thrown in jail for violating your visa?
How are you supposed to know the laws of any country you visit? Do you have some kind of universal rule you’re applying here? If I don’t know what kilometers are can I get away with speeding in Switzerland?
> That’s an extreme case, but it illustrates that this isn’t some clear-cut case of knowingly doing work that wasn’t permitted.
The details here seem to be in short supply but if they were acting as construction workers or even foreman on tourist or B1 visas what they were doing is clearly illegal. Hyundai is a multi billion dollar company they’re well capable of knowing and following US labor laws. If they can’t they have no business building a factory in the US obviously.
But with that caveat there are straightforward allegations of violations of well established US law here. The comments about breaking nitpicky union rules are intended to distract from that fact.
a. (U) An applicant coming to the United States to install, service, or repair commercial or industrial equipment or machinery purchased from a company outside the United States or to train U.S. workers to perform such services. However, in such cases, the contract of sale must specifically require the seller to provide such services or training and the visa applicant must possess unique knowledge that is essential to the seller’s contractual obligation to perform the services or training and must receive no remuneration from a U.S. source.
b. (U) These provisions do not apply to an applicant seeking to perform building or construction work, whether on-site or in-plant. The exception is for an applicant who is applying for a B-1 visa for supervising or training other workers engaged in building or construction work, but not actually performing any such building or construction work.
Why would Hyundai fly that kind of workers from across the world?
They raided a construction site, not an office building. What do you think they were doing there?
What do you think they were doing there? Having a 300+ person “business meeting”?
I'm just pointing out that no, the photos really do not say much about their work.
If they were practicing architecture in the US without proper work visas it would be illegal.
What kind of visa do they need to get? Please be very specific.
I’ve had L-1 and O-1 visas to the US in the past. Those were complicated processes that took many months and cost over $10k in legal fees each time. Those visas are explicitly meant for multi-year stays, not just work site visits. But is that the type of visa the architect should get for this business trip? If not, then what?
The laws are written out and there's lots of precedent. The point I'm making is if there's 300 people with hard hats and hi-vis vests that say "mechanic" on them (to name one example I saw in a video of the raid) there's a pretty reasonable chance they're very clearly on the wrong side of visa law.
I had mistakenly confused them with the multi-national Chaebol of the same name that is known for ruthless business competition and making decisions to maximize their own profits and shareholder wealth.
> Why would Hyundai ever open another American plant if that's how their people get treated?
If there were any tiny detail wrong, it would be revealed.
I'm glad there's some small way the US people benefitted from this action. Overall it's insane; did they try an ultimatum with lawyers, and an agreement to send everyone home, before sending in the helicopters?
It's the company that's at fault and should be the target of enforcement; do that and the employees have no reason or desire to stay in the US.
And I say all this as a Korean. This article is politically biased rather severely.
The "completely" is going quite far given the treatment of them. They could be sent a notice ordering to stop work and leave. Or the employer could be told to start applying for visa updates or else. It's not like a skilled Hyundai worker on a temporary international work assignment is likely to run away and start an undocumented life in the US instead. It was a completely unnecessary show of force that also cost more than sending a few letters.
> Christi Hulme, president of the Savannah Regional Central Labor Council, said unions that are part of her council believe Korean workers have been pouring cement, erecting steel, performing carpentry and fitting pipes. “Basically our labor was being given to illegal immigrants,” Hulme said.
So far in the US, most labor unions have generally been fairly left-wing, including being pro-immigration. Wonder how long that will last.
If you're a union that is largely concerned with preserving jobs and privileges in a shrinking industry, then there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be quite opposed to non-union immigrants coming in and "taking your jobs."
If you're a farm-worker union with a growing membership of immigrants, more concerned about adding new members and organizing than with preserving previous wins, you may be quite in favor of more immigration.
Everything is dumb, but i think this is the worst. Who thought it was a good idea?
And the US union workers agree with this? Even if they were doing illegal work, they cheer seeing fellow workers getting in chains and publicly humiliated i guess? Because of course that's the workers fault their company told them to go work there? Are they dumb?
Sorry i really like your country (well, The Appalachians and the Sierras) but wtf are you doing?
One ought go after them, but instead it's the workers that will take the blame, and leadership will go business as usual. You can't say that higher-ups didn't know what was going on, getting them there.
As a sidenote, the fact that this happened in the middle of tariff negotiations with South Korea probably was used as leverage to get more for the US, so Hyundai is probably going to get heat from the South Korean government over this gaff.
They are being punished for the leadership of US.
https://www.ft.com/content/c677b9aa-2e89-4feb-a56f-f3c8452b3...
And they would feel betrayed because their bosses probably told them it was ok.
I'm certain mistakes were made, by everyone, but how do we draw the line between breaking the law and not breaking the law?
That last part is a very, very good point. It's possible nobody ever told them. Which means the managers and the people who run the plant should be the ones in handcuffs.
Neither. The laws are enforced based on how which group is affected. For example Elon also stayed in the US technically illegally, but he won't get handled the same way.
As for why they're pissed off, that seems obvious. If say Australia wanted to have a software engineering office, invited my employer to set up an office, my employer sent me over there to do something related to that telling me it was in accordance with the law, and then the Australia government arrested me, threw me in jail, and posted videos of this all over social media, I would be pissed off too.
I understand why they did this (H1B is painful and a B1 visa may have been the only way to get people to train American factory workers), but it’s not like they were completely innocent. South Koreans were still treated with a lot more respect and dignity than almost any other ethnicity has been.
South Korea is essentially a U.S. vassal state, so there’s an expectation that ICE wouldn’t be as brutal to them as say, if they were Venezulans.
1. All these plant construction deals have due dates both on paper and off the paper. Build these by x date kind of deal in order to get x amount of support or tax cuts or regulation burden eased etc in these states. So these companies are trying to build these things ASAP.
2. Also these due dates are off the paper. When new leaders come in at federal, state or municipal, it always carries risk that some things will change and construction of it becomes difficult. Projects of this scale can be scrutinized and delayed to death because they are "illegal" because it can't fully satisfy million lines of legal clauses. It is possible because the political climate allows it. Even from Korea side, imagine new regime comes in from Korea side that tries to build ties with China, and they say we are reducing ties with US and you should ease development etc. These companies are then in negative by order of billions.
3. So time is of essence.
4. H1B would be the visa to get for these workers but it is gamed to death and these workers can't get them in time.
5. So both America side, and Korea side agree in an underhanded way to agree that these workers can come into work, build the plants and train the local workers ASAP.
6. Look at the recent interview by Trump where he even admits it is expected that workers need to come in fast to build these plants. So he's understanding of the situation. He's been a builder for his life. He know projects of these scale require a green light from the authority to work.
7. Trump is likely using this incident as a bargain chip for trade negotiations or ICE accidentally going pitbull on an unintended target
If Google, or Hyundai, get special privileges and resource investment from the state, the state should have an ownership stake in these companies. This is known to most countries and isn't particularly controversial.