What 'green transition' can teach Seoul about its AI ambitions
Christopher Khatouki
Korea has rarely been content to watch a technological revolution from the sidelines. As an industrialized, export-dependent economy, it has repeatedly sought to act early, build domestic capacity and capture first-mover advantage. Now Seoul is putting all its chips (quite literally) on artificial intelligence (AI).
In a public briefing to the nation in June this year, President Lee Jae Myung announced what he hopes will be his administration’s legacy defining economic vision: the three AI and chip megaprojects. The plan will invest trillions of won to transform the nation into a top AI powerhouse.
Yet reading the press release on a hot summer’s day in Seoul, I couldn’t help but notice a sinking feeling in my stomach. I began to ponder: Is Korea about to repeat an old mistake?
Over the preceding months, I had been examining another attempted transformation of the Korean economy: the green transition. In particular, I wanted to understand the role afforded to organized labour groups as respective administrations sought to restructure and decarbonize some of the country’s most important industries.
What struck me was not a lack of industrial ambition. Korea has that in impressive abundance. It was how often workers and their representatives were treated as an afterthought in deciding how that transformation should occur.
For an Australian researcher accustomed to an economy where organized labor has, however imperfectly, often been incorporated into major debates over economic restructuring, the contrast was striking. And it offered a warning as Korea embarks on its next great technological transformation.
First, we must recognize that there is a recent precedent for this current moment. In August 2008, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Korea, then President Lee Myung-bak unveiled his own legacy defining economic vision: low carbon, green growth.
In the midst of an international recession, Lee presented green growth not simply as a climate policy, but as a new national strategy; one through which Korea could create new industries, generate jobs and move before its competitors. Yet labor and civic groups were almost entirely excluded from the policy design and implementation process.
The signature Framework Act on Low Carbon, Green Growth made little efforts to address labor instability that could occur with industrial restructuring. In the Presidential Commission on Green Growth, the key arena for policy deliberation, no representative from the labor movement was invited to its 50-member panel.
As a result the agenda overlooked the importance of social consensus and inevitably met resistance by labor groups which pitted it as a cynical form of “greenwashing” the status quo. Contemporary research likewise identified limited civil participation as a key weakness in the green growth governance model.
This is not to say that unions are flawless and selfless actors, far from it. Rather, that decarbonizing energy-intensive industries, transforming factories and introducing new technologies inevitably raise questions about who bears the costs of change, whose jobs disappear, who receives the rewards of increased productivity and who gets to participate in making those decisions — questions that inevitably cut to the very heart of union existence in modern economies.
Only under President Moon Jae-in’s "Green New Deal," introduced more than a decade later, did the language of a “just transition” begin to slowly seep its way into policy documents. Unions also began developing their own responses. In 2021, the Korean Metal Workers’ Union reached Korea’s first industry-level agreement on industrial transformation with metal sector employers, covering employment security, retraining and joint responses to the climate crisis.
Progress, however, was uneven. When the Yoon Suk Yeol government constituted its own Carbon Neutrality and Green Growth Commission in 2022, union representation was completely removed. In 2023, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and power sector workers responded by taking the government to court, arguing that a national carbon-neutrality plan decided without worker representation violated the fundamental principles underpinning a just transition.
So far, the signals from the current administration are mixed. On the one hand, the three megaprojects were announced with almost no consultation or coordination beyond major business groups. On the other, the government shortly afterwards proposed the Industrial Transition Employment Stability Basic Plan that explicitly acknowledges the significant employment disruptions that may accompany future industrial transformation.
Yet these pressures are no longer hypothetical. Korea has already begun to witness labor conflicts linked to the AI boom at SK hynix and Samsung Electronics, as well as tensions surrounding the introduction of humanoid robots onto factory floors at Hyundai Motor. At the same time, young job seekers continue to face diminishing prospects for stable employment in a labor market already characterized by widespread irregular work.
This raises a fundamental question: Will worker participation occur only after governments are forced to confront the employment consequences of industrial transformation, or will organized labor also have a seat at the table when industrial strategy itself is being designed?
For me, this question captures the risk better than anything else could. South Korea does not need to choose between moving quickly on AI and listening to workers. The struggles of its green transition experience suggest that the more profound the economic transformation, the greater the need to build institutions capable of doing both.
One can only hope the government takes this to heart and discards an outdated mentality of labor as an obstacle, and begins to consider labor as a genuine policy partner.
Christopher Khatouki is a postdoctoral fellow with the Green Energy Statecraft Project. He was recently a visiting scholar at Seoul National University and is currently the vice president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs NSW.