BEIJING — When workers at a Honda transmission plant in China went on strike for higher wages last month, they touched off a domino effect of high-profile labor disputes.
As the strikes, many of them at foreign-owned plants, rippled through China’s southern manufacturing heartland, the government — usually quick to crush mass protests — did not step in but allowed them to spread.
That’s because it views the strikes less as a political threat these days than as an economic tool — a way to help restructure China’s current export- driven economy to a more self- sustaining one, driven by ordinary people with more cash to spend.
The demand for higher wages reflects a younger, savvier workforce that is better organized and has higher expectations, labor experts say.
Boosting wages fits in with Beijing’s strategy of closing the income gap and promoting more equal growth in coming years, said Liu Shanying, an analyst at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Political Science in Beijing.
“If incomes won’t go up, how can domestic demand be boosted? Strikes for better pay are very much in line with the big trend of Chinese economic development,” he said.
The authoritarian leadership sees the gulf between rich and poor as a threat to Communist Party rule and has cited widening income disparities as a factor in the protests. Policies aimed at raising incomes for working-class Chinese and promoting more equitable growth are a priority for the next five- year plan, which the government is drafting now.
Despite moves by the government to raise wages, they remain low. Workers’ salaries as a share of China’s economy have declined since the early 1980s, dropping from 57 percent of gross domestic product in 1983 to 37 percent in 2005.
While China has taken a less confrontational approach toward striking workers, the workers also have helped, generally keeping their demands limited and not calling for national independent unions, which are banned. Police intervention has been rare unless protests entered public areas.
