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Honda Strikers in China Offered Less Than Demanded

ZHONGSHAN, China — Wage negotiations between workers and managers at a Honda auto parts factory here ended on Friday night with the company’s final offer of a pay increase that was substantially less than employees had been seeking, a worker involved in the discussions said.

Although a spokesman for the company said the deal effectively ended two weeks of labor unrest at the Honda Lock factory here, it was unclear Friday night whether the 1,700 employees would accept the offer on Saturday or would go back out on strike.

“We can’t predict how the rest of the employees will feel about it, and we are not so happy,” said the worker, who did not want his name printed because of concerns he might anger management and the local government, which has an ownership stake in the plant.

Most employees had returned to their jobs earlier this week after the company offered a slight pay increase and began hiring replacement workers. But the company had also agreed to meet with a group of employee representatives to negotiate a bigger raise in pay.

Friday’s final offer, the worker said, was an increase of about $44 a month in wages and benefits, less than half what the workers had been seeking when they walked off the job. Workers at the factory currently earn a base salary of $117 plus a housing allowance and bonuses.

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What the company called its final offer to workers at Honda Lock was about $44 a month in increased wages and benefits. Credit...Nelson Ching/Bloomberg News

Takayuki Fujii, a spokesman for Honda, said he could not confirm details of the agreement. But he disputed the notion that the workers would still need to approve the deal when they arrived for work on Saturday morning. “The whole factory agreed to this,” he said.

Recently, a strike at another Honda supplier that makes transmissions ended after workers were offered a significant pay raise. The strike, at a plant in Foshan whose employees are more skilled than the workers at the lock factory, had effectively shut down Honda’s assembly lines in China.

Inspired by the strike in Foshan, the workers in Zhongshan staged a walkout on June 9 and then held a rally four days later outside the factory gates. But a day after the protest, the strike crumbled when management began luring replacement workers with a slightly enhanced compensation package. Many of the remaining workers agreed to return to work with the understanding that offers of a substantial wage increase would be forthcoming by the end of the week.

Workers leaving the factory on Friday evening were reluctant to speak to reporters. Some said they had been told by managers to stop the public comments that had characterized the first week of the strike, when workers were eager to air their grievances.

“The bosses have warned us against talking to the foreign media,” one worker said, in an interview by phone.

After a brief flurry of coverage in the Chinese news media, coverage of the strikes has been all but silenced by government censors. Labor unrest, however, has not been entirely squelched. A Toyota car plant in the northern port city of Tianjin stopped production on Friday after employees at two dedicated parts suppliers left assembly lines to protest low pay. On Thursday, workers staged a one-day walkout at Tianjin Star Light Rubber and Plastic but they went back to work after the company said it would review wages for the plant’s 800 workers.

On Friday, another factory that makes plastic parts for Toyota was shut down by striking workers demanding better pay.

Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Zhongshan and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Honda Strikers in China Offered Less Than Demanded. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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