Honda says two China plants remain closed

SHANGHAI — Japan's Honda Motor said two vehicle assembly plants in China remained closed Thursday due to a new labour dispute in southern China, but an earlier strike at an exhaust parts maker had ended.The latest action to hit Honda comes after a spate of suicides at Taiwanese high tech firm Foxconn and violent clashes at a Taiwan-funded rubber factory, highlighting growing worker discontent over pay and conditions in China.Production at two plants in the southern province of Guangdong run by Honda's Chinese joint venture Guangqi Honda Automobile has been shut down for a second straight day, a Tokyo-based Honda spokeswoman told AFP.The assembly lines -- first closed over the work stoppage at the exhaust parts plant -- were now closed due to a new dispute involving workers at a factory that produces car locks and key sets, she said.Work at Honda Lock (Guangdong) Co, which has about 1,500 employees, first stopped on Wednesday. The state Xinhua news agency reported that staff were seeking a monthly pay increase from 1,700 yuan (250 dollars) to 2,040 yuan."When the plants will resume operation depends on when parts supply will resume," she said.Production at Foshan Fengfu Autoparts, a joint venture between Honda's subsidiary Yutaka Giken and a Taiwanese firm that produces exhaust and muffler components, resumed on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said."The negotiations ended around 6:00 pm last night. We resumed our normal production operations from this morning." she said.The labour dispute comes after Honda, which has a production capacity of 650,000 vehicles per year in China, last week resolved a strike at its main parts unit in Guangdong by offering workers a 24 percent pay rise.Foxconn -- which counts Apple, Sony and Hewlett-Packard among its clients -- raised wages by 67 percent for its hundreds of thousands of workers in China after 11 suicides, 10 of them in the southern city of Shenzhen.But the company said Thursday it had stopped offering condolence payments to the families of staff members who kill the

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