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].”
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Taiwan’s technology protection rules prohibits Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) from producing 2-nanometer chips abroad, so the company must keep its most cutting-edge technology at home, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the remarks in response to concerns that TSMC might be forced to produce advanced 2-nanometer chips at its fabs in Arizona ahead of schedule after former US president Donald Trump was re-elected as the next US president on Tuesday. “Since Taiwan has related regulations to protect its own technologies, TSMC cannot produce 2-nanometer chips overseas currently,” Kuo said at a meeting of the legislature’s
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
RSS