A Dow Jones Newswires report said that nearly 25,000 Brazilian workers walked off the job at plants owned by Volkswagen, Ford and Scania near Sao Paulo on Wednesday after voting down a wage offer on Tuesday night.
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Another 1,500 workers at a nearby Mercedes-Benz plant also stopped work, although some activity at the factory, which employs close to 10,000 in all, was still under way, the report added.
Dow Jones said the strike marks an impasse in annual wage negotiations in Brazil’s $US20 billion-per-year automotive sector in which car manufacturers would like to keep wages in check after domestic car sales slumped 9% through September, but workers want generous raises after consumer prices shot up more than 15% over the past year.
According to Dow Jones, car makers last week offered to match inflation and raise most workers’ pay by 15.7% effective in October, but a ceiling on the offer left some higher-paid adminstrative workers out of the deal.
Thousands of adminstrative workers at the four plants walked off the job earlier this week, Dow Jones said, while, on Tuesday night, assembly line workers joined their better-paid colleagues in voting down the wage offer.
A spokeswoman for the union that represents autoworkers in the Sao Paulo industrial area where the carmakers operate told Dow Jones on Wednesday that the strike could go on indefinitely, adding that the labour leaders at the individual plants were still discussing strategy.
Workers at Volkswagen, which is in the process of laying off nearly 4,000 workers in Brazil, have already decided to continue the strike until the wage dispute is resolved, she told the news agency.
Separately, some 40,000 workers in Brazil’s extensive automotive parts industry also rejected a wage offer and decided to walk off the job late on Tuesday though that strike has yet to begin, the spokeswoman told Dow Jones.
