Money world

ZHONGSHAN, China — Striking workers at a Honda auto parts factory in southeastern China have won higher wages — but not necessarily for themselves.

Factory managers began hiring a steady stream of replacement workers on Sunday, and a significant number of strikers went back to work after increases in wages and benefits, even as many others remained on strike.

The 20 or so members of the factory’s council of workers, chosen by the workers to represent them when the strike began on Wednesday, went into hiding over the weekend, fearing retaliation by the authorities.

It is too early to tell whether the apparent resolution of this strike — somewhat higher wages but lost jobs for many of the strikers — will set a pattern elsewhere as labor unrest spreads. Workers in the industrial southeast of China and elsewhere have been turning a labor shortage to their advantage by demanding better pay and working conditions.

But in Zhongshan, Honda has used the area job market to its advantage.

The Honda Lock parts factory in Zhongshan can run on lower-skilled, less-educated workers than the Honda transmission factory in Foshan, a two-hour drive to the northwest payday loans for bad credit. The Foshan strike brought the company’s auto-assembly operations in China to a temporary standstill — and the regular work force there was lured back to its jobs with reportedly much larger wage increases than Honda is offering in Zhongshan.

Replacement workers and returning employees in Zhongshan are receiving 11 percent higher pay and a 33 percent rise in allowances for food and housing, as of Sunday. The combined increase in wages and benefits was considerably less than the near doubling of wages alone that the strikers had sought. Even so, the improved compensation — wages of $152 a month and an allowance of $59 a month — was enough to make the jobs attractive to replacement workers.

The remaining strikers held a small rally outside the factory on Sunday morning but then went home and made no effort to picket as operations resumed.

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