Honda workers fear management ‘lock-in’

In the west, managers can threaten stubborn workforces with a lock-out. Chinese workers have a different fear – the lock-in.

On Saturday morning, executives at a Honda components factory failed to convince hundreds of striking Chinese workers to enter the plant to discuss a wage dispute. “If we agree, they will just lock us in,” said Sun Tinghu, one of the hundreds of workers gathered outside Honda Lock’s facility in southern Guangdong province.

The workers eventually decided to wait at the factory gates to hear management’s response to their demands for a 70 per cent pay raise in basic monthly salaries to Rmb1,600 ($230).

Executives, however, refused to make any offers until the strikers agreed to attend a mass meeting in a factory workshop. The Catch-22 confrontation, which ended with workers holding their ground and returning home for a fourth straight day, highlights how the lack of independent and representative unions in China are making it very difficult for the Japanese carmaker to communicate with employees and resolve its labour crisis.

Honda subsequently said the dispute had been resolved, but workers contradicted that assertion and the situation was further confused by the onset of a four-day public holiday in China.

The drama began at around 8am on Saturday morning at an intersection near Honda Lock’s plant in Zhongshan, a factory town in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta manufacturing belt. While the struggle pitted Chinese labour against Japanese capital, all the protagonists were Chinese.

Officials from China’s only government-sanctioned union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, were conspicuous in their absence. “The official union is worse than useless – they are traitors,” a young female worker complained as her colleagues laughed in agreement.

“This won’t resolve the problem,” Liu Huafei, an executive with the factory’s personnel department, said through a bullhorn. Similar pleas from Honda Lock’s vice-general manager, Zhou Jinhe, also fell on deaf ears.

Another worker, Liu Shengqi, borrowed the managers’ bullhorn, saying that he and his colleagues would only agree to enter the plant if management first presented them with a reasonable pay increase. The workers had earlier rejected and ridiculed a proposed Rmb100, or 10 per cent, increase in the basic monthly salary.

“Our demands are very simple,” said Liu Shengqi, who appeared slightly older than the other workers and sported a wedding ring. “Many of us are married with children and we need to take care of her families.”

The majority of Honda Lock’s employees are single women in their late teens or early 20s. Many complained that their current base salary of Rmb930 a month, set just above Zhongshan’s minimum wage, was inadequate. Most live in nearby private rental accommodation costing Rmb200-300 a month.

Workers said their monthly wage demand of Rmb1,600 was based on the precedent set on June 4 by striking workers at Honda Automotive Components Manufacturing, a transmission factory in the nearby city of Foshan.

They added that they had read about their colleagues’ victory in the local media, before Beijing banned further reports on strikes at three Honda components factories that affected its China supply chain over the past month. The lock workers, however, have not been in direct contact with the Foshan transmission workers and appeared confused about the details of the settlement there. The workers in Foshan in fact secured a 25 per cent raise to Rmb1,900 a month, with additional bonus and benefit concessions.

Despite his prominent role on Saturday morning, Liu Shengqi denied being a strike leader: “I’m not a worker representative,” he said. “We don’t have any representatives.”

The lack of a clear leadership structure among the workers, who eventually dispersed, appeared to frustrate Honda managers. “If they want to understand the situation, they are going to have to come into the factory and meet with us,” Liu Huafei, the personnel department executive, sighed as he watched the workers walk back to their homes.