The actions at Honda's China suppliers come against a broader backdrop of rising labor costs and growing worker agitation at other employers around the Pearl River Delta, one of China's main manufacturing hubs.

One of the region's top employers, Foxconn International Holdings, a unit of Taiwan contract electronics giant Hon Hai Precision Industry, has offered workers at its Shenzhen manufacturing hub big pay rises as it tries to deal with fallout from a spate of suicides there.

Workers at the exhaust factory had been on strike since the first shift on Monday, a Honda spokesman in Tokyo said.

The factory, a joint venture between Yutaka Giken, which is 70 percent owned by Honda, and Taiwan's Taoyuan Fuwei, employs about 500 workers, a spokesman at Yutaka Giken said.

Local government officials were onsite to negotiate with workers, said the secretary of the Taiwan Business Association in in the southern city of Foshan, where the factory is based.

The plant makes mufflers and other exhaust parts for Honda's four Chinese car factories, belonging to Guangqi Honda, a 50-50 joint venture between Honda and Guangzhou Automobile, Dongfeng Honda and an export-only factory that builds the Jazz subcompact.
 

Honda was assessing how production could be affected by the action, the Honda spokesman said, adding that there were sufficient parts for now to build cars.

The labor action at the plant, Foshan Fengfu Autoparts, began early on Monday when about 20 workers began rallying their colleagues to go on strike, the South China Morning Post reported.

The entire workforce had downed tools as of Tuesday afternoon, and management was negotiating with workers with the aim of restarting production as soon as possible, Yutaka spokesman Kazuhito Anma said.

Their action comes after workers at another plant supplying transmissions to Honda's China joint ventures received a pay raise last week after striking over wages, bringing Honda's car production in China to a halt.

"If their strike hadn't been successful, our workers here probably wouldn't be as united as we are now," the newspaper quoted a 22-year-old worker from Hunan province as saying.

Foshan Fengfu is the main suppliers of exhaust systems and other parts used in China for Honda's Accord, Odyssey and Fit, which are made by Guangqi Honda.

Asian employers in general have become less attractive among foreign employers for Chinese workers, said Lin Huaibin, an industry analyst with IHS Global Insight.

"If you ask college graduates to pick their employers, most would pick US or European companies. Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies have never been at the top of the list, not just because of lower salaries but also because of rigid management styles," Lin said. "If they don't want to see more strikes and walkouts, they'd better raise salaries and change the way they run their businesses."