Fragmentation of workers in the Hungarian battery industry

Abstract

Hungary has become a major global production site of batteries for electric vehicles in the past years. Primarily East Asian capital established battery cell manufacturing factories in the country which supply German OEMs’ electric car assembly in Hungary and Eastern Europe.

The paper argues that the current crisis of capitalism with the ecological crisis, capital’s strategies of the electromobility transition and global uneven development have led to a further fragmentation of workers in Hungary, with exacerbating exploitation and accumulation by dispossession. Cheap labour and cheap nature in Hungary are combined with East Asian capital to produce relatively cheap electric cars by German OEMs for customers in the core countries of the European Union.

Apart from direct workers in battery gigafactories in Hungary, an increasing share of Hungarians and third-country nationals are employed as temporary agency workers in the sector. This is enabled by regulatory changes in migration regimes and labour policies. In the past years, Hungarian and Ukrainian direct and indirect workers are started to be substituted by agency workers from the Global South, such as from the Philippines. On the local scale, a further fragmentation of workers takes place through the fact that only a small fraction of battery factory workers lives in the same municipality, and most of them commute to work from larger distances with company buses.

Beside fragmentation of workers, exploitation is taking place through deskilling, as the production of electric cars necessitates less skilled workers than the production of combustion-engine cars. Battery cell production is also automated to a high extent, resulting in a large share of unskilled jobs at the assembly line.

Meanwhile, previous strategies of transnational labour organizing, built on putting pressure on German OEMs through a transnational partnership between German and Hungarian unions are also facing challenges, as East Asian battery manufacturers have become more powerful actors in the global value chain of electric cars. Also, a broader transnational labour solidarity is shattered by recent years’ increasingly racist and anti-migrant hatred incited by the Hungarian government, leading to tensions between Hungarian and non-Hungarian workers at workplaces.