Comparison of Labor Disputes at Foxconn and Nanhai Honda

Abstract

Labor history in China has been dramatically changed from 2010 since labor disputes broke out in Honda transmission plant in Foshan, and copycat suicides in Longhua and Guanlan facilities of Foxconn in Shenzhen. Labor disputes in Honda and Foxconn are unprecedented in Chinese labor history due to their explosiveness, duration, and number of participants. These strikes triggered to change the forms of labor strikes, and also instigated numerous strikes to take place in similar forms across Pearl River Delta region. These unprecedented scale of labor strikes at Honda and Foxconn caught attention of media, and scholars in and outside China. Important questions that were asked were: Why did such large scaled labor disputes take place in 2010? Why did these labor disputes break out in Guangdong province? Lastly, why do disputes at Honda and Foxconn sharply contrast to one another despite under the same type of ownership? In order to respond to discussion questions, and to tackle the research question, this article relied on secondary sources which ranged from scholarly articles, CSER reports, to labor reports conducted by NGOs. The first two questions are going to be discussed along with the history of labor unrest and common implications of recent labor strikes in the following chapters of this article. More importantly, this paper is going to emphasize on responding to the last question – why the strikes at Honda and Foxconn sharply contrast to one another even though both incidents broke out under the multinational corporations which share various similarities on their systems. This article claims that there were four variables that diverged developments and outcomes of the labor strikes at Foxconn and Nanhai Honda, which individually are form of the leadership, level of skills required by workforce, major proportion of the labor force, and the balance of power between workplace trade unions and municipal governments.