Toyota Motor Corp stopped production at its main factory in China after a strike at its plastic parts supplier, the carmaker said yesterday, the latest in a series of labor disputes across the country.
Toyota said its factory at Tianjin, near Beijing, stopped production midway through the day on Friday.
Company spokeswoman Ririko Takeuchi said the Tianjin Toyota plant, with three assembly lines and a combined annual production capacity of 420,000 vehicles, was closed for the weekend and plans for resuming production tomorrow depended on securing steady supplies from strike-hit parts maker Toyoda Gosei.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Two walkouts have hit the parts supplier for Toyota. Workers at the Toyoda Gosei plant, also in Tianjin, said late on Friday the strike disrupting supply lines was still on.
However, workers at a Honda auto parts plant in southern China showed up for work yesterday apparently ready to accept a new pay deal to resolve a week-long strike.
The new Honda deal was emerging after days of difficult talks between worker representatives and management. It failed to yield any further raising of base salary levels from a 200-yuan (US$29) wage hike already offered and rejected by striking workers last weekend.
Despite the apparent setback, many workers at the Honda Lock plant in the Pearl River Delta town of Zhongshan appeared ready to accept the terms and put the strikes behind them.
“We’re tired of all this tension,” said one young factory girl who was among hundreds streaming to work at the Honda plant. “We just want to go back to work and see what happens.”
While Honda Lock has not yet confirmed the fresh offer, one worker source said that worker representatives negotiating on their behalf had accepted this “final deal.”
Notices of the new deal were posted up inside the factory, workers said, announcing a 200-yuan rise in base salary levels and an 80-yuan rise in housing benefits.
A Honda Motor spokeswoman said yesterday a strike hit a factory affiliate Nihon Plast Co in Zhongshan on Thursday and supply was temporarily disrupted.
Honda said production at the factory, which makes plastic parts such as steering wheels, had resumed on Friday but that negotiations between workers and management were still going on. Car production was not impacted.
The Nihon Plast factory also supplies steering wheels and airbags to Nissan Motor Co but a spokesman at Nissan said there had been no impact on its car production.
China’s commerce minister shrugged off concerns that recent labor unrest in the so-called “workshop of the world” will scare investors away, state media reported yesterday.
“A small proportion of the contracts may be transferred to countries with lower costs but China has yet to lose its labor cost advantage,” Chinese Minister of Commerce Chen Deming (陳德銘) was quoted as saying by the official China Daily newspaper.
Chen told Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV that the recent strikes were “isolated cases.”
“We want to ensure workers get an appropriate wage increase but also want to pay attention to the capacity of enterprises to bear the burden [of rising personnel costs].”
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