The Making of an Unjust Transition: Union Internal Politics in the Shift to Electric Vehicles

ABSTRACT

The transition to electric vehicles is deepening labour market dualism, yet unions—widely expected to contest this trend—have often reinforced it. This paper argues that coordination, the organizational capacity to align heterogeneous interests and sustain collective discipline across levels, is a key mechanism determining whether union power resources translate into solidaristic or exclusionary outcomes. Drawing on fieldwork at Hyundai Motor Group in South Korea, it shows that despite substantial structural, associational and institutional power, weak coordination between union leadership and the shopfloor allowed core worker interests to dominate workplace‐level negotiations, creating openings for management to expand precarious employment within assembly plants and deepen segmentation across the supply chain. The paper extends power resource theory by specifying coordination as a distinct organizational condition, and contributes to just transition scholarship by showing how intra‐union dynamics shape the distributional outcomes of industrial transformation.