Workers at Japanese electronics maker Omron's southern China factory have gone on strike, the latest disruption in the manufacturing hub over demands for better wages and working conditions.

A strike has broken out at a south China factory supplying parts for Japan's Honda Motor, the latest in a string of stoppages by Chinese workers demanding a bigger piece of the country's economic wealth. The strike, at Atsumitec Co. in the city of Foshan, began on Monday, with about 90 of the plant's 200 workers stopping work to demand a nearly 60 percent pay increase, said a worker who declined to be identified.

After a morning of confrontation with his bosses at an auto parts factory in southern China, Wei took a different route home to avoid the plain-clothes police tailing him. As soon as he reached his building, Wei darted up a flight of stairs to his small rented room and logged onto a desktop computer.

Zhang Liwen found out that she was about to go on strike over a breakfast of steamed buns and congee rice porridge at her factory dormitory. Fifteen minutes later, she was taking part in industrial action for the first time in her life.

abour rights campaigners have warned that more industrial discontent is likely in China despite a round of minimum wage increases that took effect yesterday. The minimum pay rates in at least nine provinces and cities were increased, in some cases by as much as a third, after a series of strikes over pay at manufacturing plants.

Chinese migrant laborers toiling in the factories of two major firms won unusually hefty raises in recent weeks, as Honda sought to end strikes and Foxconn, maker of the Apple iPad, tried to stave off criticism over a spate of worker suicides. But multinationals that find themselves backed into a corner are not the only ones starting to heed the demands of increasingly emboldened employees. In some instances government officials here in China’s southern factory belt, Guangdong Province, have also made small concessions as more workers stage sit-ins and pursue legal channels for compensation.

At a Honda engine-gear factory in southern China, a two-week strike by workers at the end of last month ended amicably when the company agreed to a 24 percent increase in wages and conditions. At the Pingmian Textile Group factory in central China, a two-week strike by workers also ended after the company agreed to a 25 percent increase in wages – but not before local police launched a crackdown on the protesters and detained more than 20 strikers.

As an unprecedented wave of strikes rolled across China this month – shutting car plants and electronics component makers – the staff at the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing decided they, too, had had enough.

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 of any kind — did not step in, but allowed them to spread.

As Honda workers in Guangdong savour their pay rises gained through strategy and persistence, strikes at Toyota supplier factories in Tianjin last week appeared much less organised and crumbled at the early intervention of police and officials. From the workers' perspectives, Guangdong and Tianjin could not be more different in terms of the way the strikes were handled and their effectiveness. Even within the same company, strikes at Toyota parts suppliers in the southern manufacturing hub this week led to a three-day production halt at Guangqi Toyota, while similar strikes in the northeastern municipality held out only long enough to delay production at FAW Toyota by one day.