Co-Evolving Industry-Labor Transitions In Future Mobility: Asian Trajectories and Global Comparisons

The global automotive industry is being reorganized around the transition to future mobility, as electrification, software-defined vehicles, and geopolitical supply-chain realignment shift manufacturing capacity and strategic competition increasingly toward Asia. This session develops an industry–labor coevolutionary perspective to examine future mobility as an institutionally embedded economic transition. Rather than treating technological change or market competition as autonomous forces, the session asks how state strategies, firm restructuring, production-network reconfiguration, and labor institutions jointly constitute the emerging economic order of future mobility. The first paper examines a Korean transnational automaker’s EV investment in a developing economy in Asia, showing how institutional malleability can unsettle first-mover advantages, reshape competitive outcomes, and condition the employment and skill regimes through which EV production is localized in policy-dependent industries. The second paper investigates how Chinese auto supplier unions influence divergent automation trajectories at the shop-floor level. The third paper compares Labor unions' contrasting strategies during the EV bargaining rounds, illuminating the conditions under which labor can exercise strategic capacity in just-transition negotiations. The fourth paper analyzes how Asian EV transnationals’ entry into European production networks is redefining value-chain geographies, competitive pressures, and labor standards.

By placing Asian cases in comparative dialogue with North American and European experiences, the session explores how the relocation of future mobility manufacturing toward Asia is remaking the institutional foundations of economic competition, labor power, and social inequality. It asks whether this transition will deepen labor marginalization or generate new coevolutionary pathways linking industrial upgrading with decent work.

Session Organizer:

Joonkoo LEE, Hanyang University, South Korea, joonklee@hanyang.ac.kr

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