DALIAN, China -- As more foreign-owned factories close in China due to higher labor costs and a strengthening yuan, workers there are growing increasingly nervous that their jobs will be next. Talk of unpaid salaries and meager severance pay has many employees feeling angry and unmotivated. Tensions are rising.

The city of Dalian, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, is falling into a recession. The province's gross domestic product expanded just 1.9% on the year in the January-March quarter, the lowest growth in the country and well below the government's nationwide target of around 7% for the current year.

Waiting game

"I'm not motivated at all," said a woman in her 40s who works at the factory of a Japanese electrical machinery manufacturer in Dalian, home to nearly 2,000 Japanese companies.

She said she has worked there for more than 10 years, and that she used to work hard and liked her job. Though the plant is still steadily churning out products, she is afraid that could change at any time.

The woman said she lost her motivation to work hard when employees at a nearby factory operated by Japanese electronics manufacturer Toshiba went on strike at the end of 2013.

Toshiba had been manufacturing TVs at the Dalian plant since 1997. But when it started losing money, the company decided to close the facility. Some 900 workers, surrounded by armed police, protested against management, demanding more compensation money. Toshiba eventually met their demands.

The woman at the neighboring plant said all she thinks about now is receiving a fair severance payout. "The only thing I'm looking forward to is getting that money," she said.

Fed up

Shortly past 10 a.m. on March 5, when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was declaring in his policy speech in Beijing that China would shift from being a big manufacturing power to a strong manufacturing power, a massive labor strike was breaking out in Dongguan, Guangdong Province.

Around 5,000 workers at a Taiwanese-owned factory that makes shoes for Nike and other famous brands were demanding that their employer pay them money they claim they were owed. The strike spread to neighboring plants the next day, pushing up the number of protesters to the tens of thousands.

More than 100 Japanese companies have pulled up stakes in Dongguan in the past five years for various reasons. Many top officials of Japanese companies still operating in China are growing nervous about how to proceed now that "business as usual" no longer applies in the world's factory.

But their woes will not likely find much sympathy from the average Chinese factory worker. Even local officials are frustrated.

"If they really want to leave China, leave quickly. But we will never let them do business in China again," said a senior Chinese Communist Party official who has long headed the labor union at a factory of a major Japanese electrical machinery manufacturer.

(Nikkei)