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Mimi Lau

Workers from Honda Lock (Guangdong) yesterday rejected another pay rise offer and vowed to continue the strike that started on Wednesday.
They also disputed a Honda Group representative's  claim that the labour dispute had been settled and workers had returned to work.
At around 8am yesterday, about 500 workers gathered outside the plant in Zhongshan's  Xiaolan, hoping to hear a compromise from  management. 
The company  offered a 100 yuan (HK$114)  pay rise on Thursday, but it was turned down by workers.
Staff refused to comply with a request from management for them to enter the plant, saying they did not want to be locked in as had happened on the first two days of the strike.
They dispersed peacefully at about 9.30am, without further communication from management. 
Unlike Friday - when riot police sealed off the road during a standoff with workers - only a few dozen  uniformed police were seen on the scene yesterday.
 The Honda Lock factory, which employs about 1,500 people, supplies key sets, door locks and other parts to Honda Motor. 
Yesterday afternoon, workers said they had received phone calls from their division leaders at around 2pm, saying management would pay them an extra 100 yuan bonus per month and asking them to return to work. 
But the Sunday Morning Post spoke to several workers yesterday who said they had not returned to work and they were not aware of any colleagues who had. 
'We are  continuing the strike,' a 22-year-old female worker from Guangxi  said. 'No way, we won't go back just for that,' she said. 
'We have friends working in other  factories in Xiaolan town. As soon as those factories heard about our strike, the workers there immediately received a pay rise of 300 yuan,' she said. 
A 30-year-old  female worker from Hubei  said she  no longer trusted management after it asked workers on Friday to either accept a 100 yuan  pay rise or resign. 'We are scared and angry. The workers are not here to  light fires or murder people -  why do they need to send riot police? It's been four days already and the company  has yet to give us a satisfactory response,' she said.  
Some workers said about 100 of them returned to the factory compound at around 4pm  to check if other  employees had accepted the new offer, but they returned home  half an hour later and said they did not see any staff reporting for duty.
But Takayuki Fuji, a Beijing-based Honda spokesman, gave a conflicting account.
He said the strike at Honda Lock was  over and workers had returned to work but refused to disclose details of the pay rise being offered to  factory employees. 
'The strike finished [yesterday] around noon,' he said.
'The production line  has already started. There are a lot of processes in a factory and they are beginning to restart. The line started from the second shift around 4pm,' he said. 
He also denied a Xinhua report yesterday that Honda might again halt production in China as talks with striking workers were deadlocked. 
The report cited an unnamed Honda spokesman as saying the current inventory of locks could last only until yesterday and the company had yet to set production plans for any time after today.  
 Fuji   said motor assembly lines  at Guangqi Honda's factories in Huangpu and Zengcheng  would not be affected.
'All I can say is that there is no influence to the car assembly line in Guangqi Honda,' Fuji said. 
The reasons for the conflicting accounts given by the Honda spokesman, the company's staff and official media remain unclear.
The first round of industrial action to hit Honda's operations ended last Friday when workers at Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing  in Foshan returned to work after a two-week strike. The shutdown led to parts shortages which closed Honda's four car factories in Guangzhou and Wuhan . 
Management agreed to increase  workers' basic salary by about 500 yuan. Their success prompted about 250 workers at a Guangdong exhaust parts supplier, Foshan Fengfu Autoparts,  to walk off the job on Monday, demanding better wages and double pay for overtime.




Honda Lock staff to stay on strike after rejecting pay offer