A strike of ‘unorganised’ workers in a Chinese car factory: the Nanhai Honda events of 2010

• Date: 01 March 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12089
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Author: Quan Meng,Jun Lu,Xuebing Cao,Dave Lyddon

A strike of ‘unorganised’ workers in a

Chinese car factory: the Nanhai Honda

events of 2010

Dave Lyddon, Xuebing Cao, Quan Meng and Jun Lu

ABSTRACT

This strike in a Chinese factory of the Japanese multinational Honda in 2010 received

worldwide coverage. A young workforce sustained an on–off strike, with varying

numbers of workers involved, for 19 days. Academic interest has focused on prospects

for collective bargaining and union reform in China. This article, using interviews

with former strikers, and newspaper sources, analyses the strike process. The work-

place union, as a constituent of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and subject

to the Chinese Party–state, was hostile; so the workers were in effect ‘unorganised’.

Examples of non-union strikes in the interwar car industry of the USA and UK show

the similarity of situation with the Honda workers. Hiller’s classic text, The Strike,

provides a surprisingly suitable framework for understanding strikes of unorganised

workers. The strikers’ vocabulary ‘framed’ their demands initially as injustice, but

incorporated anti-Japanese sentiment and, then, dignity, in response to events.

1 INTRODUCTION

In going on strike at a transmission factory, workers here have Honda by the jugular [vein], although

it was not entirely clear at the employees’ dormitory . . . that they realized this. Transmission factories

are the most expensive auto plants of all to build. . . . The factory here supplies four Honda plants in

China, all of which have been shut down (New York Times, 28 May 2010).

The interdependent nature of factories in the car industry, exacerbated by local and

global just-in-time supply practices, can make companies peculiarly vulnerable to

stoppages in one factory. In May and June 2010 this was illustrated by the series of

strikes, for large pay increases, in the Chinese factories of the Japanese multinational

company Honda (particularly that in the Nanhai district of Foshan city, Guangdong

province, 100 miles north-west of Hong Kong); these were followed by strikes at

Toyota-affiliated factories in China. When the Nanhai Honda strike created short-

ages of gearboxes, leading to the shutdown of all Honda’s four Chinese assembly

factories, news of it even reached The Times (28 May 2010) and the Economist (3 June

❒Dave Lyddon is Honorary Fellow in Industrial Relations and Xuebing Cao is Lecturer in HRM, both

at Keele Management School, Keele University; Quan Meng is Lecturer in Capital University of Econom-

ics and Business, China, and Jun Lu is Associate Professor in Shandong University of Finance and

Economics, China. Correspondence should be addressed to Dave Lyddon, Keele University, Keele,

Staffordshire ST5 5BG; email: d.lyddon@keele.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 46:2, 134–152

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2010) in Britain. For two days the Chinese authorities, playing on anti-Japanese

sentiment, unusually allowed domestic news coverage of the strike, thus ensuring its

notoriety within China itself. The method of ending the strike by a negotiated settle-

ment with the workforce, and the string of copycat actions that its success generated,

has triggered a steady stream of academic comment (e.g. Chan and Hui, 2012; 2014;

Chang, 2010; Chang and Brown, 2013; Friedman, 2012; 2013; Gray and Jang, 2014;

Hui, 2011; Lau, 2012).

Multinational companies are not allowed to assemble cars or manufacture compo-

nents in China, except through joint venture partnerships with domestic firms. In

1983, when the first joint venture opened, only 5,200 passenger cars were produced in

China. This had grown to 220,000 by 1993 and to 2.3 million in 2004 (Chin, 2010: 4).

With China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001, ‘pro-

duction skyrocketed’ (Anderson, 2012: 15) as protectionist measures were gradually

reduced and prices fell. Its annual car production overtook Japan’s in 2009 to become

the largest in the world, and the industry has carried on growing at a phenomenal rate.

In 2010 Chinese factories produced 13.9 million cars, which had risen to 18.1 million

three years later (OICA, 2014). All the big automobile multinationals now have a

presence in China, with Honda setting up joint venture assembly companies in 1998

and 2003 (Anderson, 2012: 268). The Nanhai Honda component factory (a joint

venture established in 2007) operated a three-shift system and employed a predomi-

nantly young migrant workforce of about 1,800 (90 per cent male in 2011), the

majority (different sources give different percentages) of whom were interns (average

age 18), third-year students from technical colleges, recruited every year, and paid a

lower wage than regular workers. The strike was an on–off affair, with varying

proportions of the workforce involved. A limited stoppage on 17 May 2010 was

followed by a partial strike on 20–21 May, no overtime (to make up for lost produc-

tion) worked on the weekend of 22–23 May, effectively a full strike between 24 May

and 1 June, then a resumption of work until final negotiations on 4 June were

accompanied by a small stoppage. After establishing a suitable framework with which

to analyse the strike, the rest of the article charts its course.

2 THEORY, CONTEXT AND METHOD

While the number of strikes is historically extremely low in Europe and North

America, strikes in the new ‘workshop of the world’—China—are becoming more

common (Chan, 2009; China Labour Bulletin, Research Report, 2014; Elfstrom and

Kuruvilla, 2014; van der Velden et al., 2007). Even before the increased marketisation

of the Chinese economy, strikes were not unknown. Since the early 1980s there has

been a spate of ‘mass incidents’ recorded, though the term ‘strike’ often encompassed

actions by workers after they had lost their jobs. Such incidents included blocking

highways and besieging local government buildings, particularly when workers were

laid off from state-owned enterprises (Chan, 2010: 24–42; Lee, 2000: 43, 48–53;

Pringle, 2011: 77–81). Labour shortages and greater experience of the factory system

led to a ‘normalization’ of strikes in the 2000s, and ‘strikes and picket lines have

gradually replaced sit-ins and marches’ (Pringle, 2011: 103).

Pringle (2011: 103–104) has used Hobsbawm’s term ‘collective bargaining by riot’

(1964: 7) to describe the ‘short strikes and protests [that] have become an extremely

prompt and effective way of redressing . . . grievances’ in China, where workers have

‘developed a very good idea of what they can get away with and how far they can go’.

135The Nanhai Honda strike of ‘unorganised’ workers in 2010

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd