South Korean battery plant keeps sacking Hungarian workers after pocketing billions for job creation

Since December 2023, around 60 Hungarian workers have been made redundant by Bumchun from its plant in Salgótarján, where they produce components for electric car batteries. The dismissed workers were working on the production line, doing unskilled work, and were employed mostly through temporary agencies.

At the end of last year, a significant number of Vietnamese guest workers arrived at the factory, trained by Hungarian workers who had been made redundant before their replacements were taken aboard. Asian workers are now working in place of the Hungarian workers who lost their jobs, the news portal reported. According to workers' reports, another 30 guest workers arrived at the plant in early January, and another 50 redundancies were announced.

When South Korea's Bumchun Precision announced that it would build its first plant outside Korea in Hungary for HUF 13.3 billion, the state decided to support the project with a HUF 2.65 billion grant, saying the tier 1 automotive industry supplier would create 200 jobs in Salgótarján.

In the company's 2020 and 2021 accounts, the amount of the state aid is even higher, with Bumchun receiving a total of HUF 3.32 billion in support from the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA) in those two years.

The other revenue line also includes an additional state grant of about HUF 257 million for 2021/2022. It is not specified whether the money paid from the state budget was part of the HIPA support or was additional aid, the paper wrote.

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