Hyundai Motors is doing well. Over in the highly contested North American market, Toyota sold 30 percent less in January of this year compared with 2008, while Hyundai saw a 15 percent increase in sales for the same period. Toyota’s poor results have led the company to lay off more than 3,000 irregular employees since September of last year, and yet Hyundai Motors is basically maintaining its current number of employees. You even hear people joke about how, in Korea, you can enjoy life-long employment.

What is it that makes Hyundai Motors able to make an opportunity for growth out of the economic crisis? As seen in how the Genesis was chosen North American Car of the Year, improved quality and aggressive marketing have contributed to some of the success. No one can deny, however, that the reason for the recent sales performance is an exchange rate that shot so high it doubled what the won was against the dollar. You are watching an ironic situation in which a weak point in the Korean economy -- that it is so dependent on exports -- is instead making an exporting company more competitive.

The question is whether the competitiveness is sustainable. If the exchange rate stabilizes in the second half of the year, the upward trend in exports is going to run into a wall. More fundamentally this is a matter of Hyundai’s inability to grow out of the “developing country mode” of depending on price. Toyota workers usually work 2,000 hours a year while Hyundai’s workers work 2,400 hours, with no small number of them working more than 3,000. Hyundai tries to gain cost competitiveness through long hours that permit a higher plant operation ratio and lower hourly wages.

Long hours necessarily hurt production efficiency. They also hurt society’s ability to reproduce for lowering the quality of life and negatively influencing birth and child-rearing. That is why the union and the management agreed in September of last year to adopt a program of successive daytime shifts. The idea is to replace the current structure of working hours from two 10-hour shifts, one at night and one during the day, with a system of two successive eight-hour daytime shifts, thereby increasing productivity and maintaining the current level of production with shorter working hours.

The union and the company also agreed to go with a monthly wage system. The hourly wage system there currently makes workers excessively dependent on overtime and “special holiday working days” and hurts production flexibility. When worker income depends on the amount of products produced, the factory’s ability to produce flexibly is restricted.

The new daytime schedule could be a decisive part of transforming Hyundai’s production system from “developing country mode” to one befitting an “advanced nation” in the sense that it makes quality of life and improved productivity able to coexist. The agreement to go with a work routine of two eight-hour shifts daily, an agreement arrived at after much difficulty, however, is about to run into problems. The reason is all too simple. The company says that it will have a hard time going with the monthly wage system since production is shrinking because of the economic crisis, while the union is demanding that it guarantee those wages be paid on a monthly basis.

Everyone knows that a company, by its nature, wants to save every last penny in terms of wages. But no one thinks highly of a company that neglects long-term strategy and vision because of short-term profit calculations. Hyundai Motors’ management needs to have the deeper view that establishing a more desirable way of going about production is what is more important and do all it can to implement it.

Everyone knows you can put up with a slight wage cut if your hours are shortened. If Hyundai cannot maintain the same level of wages, then it should consider going ahead with the two-shifts a day structure and bring up the issue of wages after production levels recover. How can we expect a union that cannot win that much will be able to be a part of what supports the mid and long-range development of our society?

Hyundai Motors should find a sustainable growth model now, when conditions for competition overseas are advantageous. It will be inviting crisis on its own head if it loses this opportunity.

The views presented in this column are the writer's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.