Hyundai Motor’s labor union has voted to strike, as negotiation with the management is making little progress. It set the stage for a walkout for the fourth consecutive year.

The union said it would boycott overtime work starting Monday. It will also participate in a joint rally with the unions of the three major shipbuilders, which was already planning to stage partial strikes later this week.

Being a union notorious for its hard-line stance, it is little surprising that the Hyundai Motor union is taking such unilateral actions. This time, however, one cannot help but feel bitter about the unionists’ insatiable greed.

The unionized workers are totally disregarding the difficulty their own company is encountering: Hyundai’s sales in the first half of this year dropped 3.2 percent and its operating profit plunged 17 percent.

The sign for a bigger problem came from the Chinese market, where Hyundai’s car sales plummeted 30 percent in July and August. Its domestic market share is continuing to slide, with the latest figure falling to 38 percent.

This notwithstanding, the union is demanding a 7.84 percent hike in the base salary and as much as 30 percent of the net profit as performance-based bonus.

All these demands are raised by a union whose members already enjoy such generous compensations as to be called “labor aristocrats” or “nobles.” Each Hyundai worker receives an average of 97 million won ($82,000) yearly, more than the earnings of its rivals like Toyota and Volkswagen. In contrast, the per capita sales of Hyundai fall short of half of Toyota’s.

The union’s demand to change the retirement age to 65 tells us how greedy it can be. The nation’s legal retirement age is being extended to 60 next year, a belated step to cope with the fast aging of the population.

The plan will certainly press employers to cut back on recruitment of new entry-level employees, exacerbating the already serious youth unemployment problem. This is why the institution of a wage peak system is a major element of the labor reform proposals pushed by the government.

Union leaders participating in the ongoing tripartite talks on labor reform still oppose the proposal for a wage peak system. In other words, Korea is not yet fully ready to embrace even 60 as the legal retirement age.

The Hyundai union is also refusing to adopt the wage peak system, demanding its members be allowed to stay on their job for five years longer than the legal limit. They don’t even know the basic principle of give and take in negotiations.

Hyundai’s case reminds us once again that the ongoing reform work -– not least, measures to increase flexibility in the labor market and reducing the compensation gap between big and small firms and between regular and irregular workers -- must succeed by any means.