Foxconn – Analog Artist Digital World

Protests erupted at Foxconn the huge iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhenvgzhou China.Police in hazmat suits clubbed the factory workers protesting.

Last month, the factory was locked down due to rising COVID cases. Some workers scaled the fences to break out and go home. Former workers estimate that thousands have fled the factory campus. The company then recruited new workers with the promise of generous bonuses.

Rumors circulated that new recruits were being asked to share dormitories with workers who were Covid-positive. When new workers arrived they were told they would not get the bonuses promised until they had worked at the much lower pay for several weeks. One protestor via a live stream said, “They changed the contract so that we could not get the subsidy as they had promised. They quarantine us but don’t provide food.”

Foxconn has established closed loop operations at the plant, keeping it isolated from the wider city of Zhengzhou. Workers are not supposed to leave. The Zhengzhou plant employs more than 200,000 people. It is not known how many are infected with COVID. “It’s now evident that closed-loop production in Foxconn only helps in preventing COVID from spreading to the city, but does nothing (if not make it even worse) for the workers in the factory,” Aiden Chau of China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group, said in an email.

Foxconn has apologized for a “technical error” in its payment systems, a day after its iPhone factory in China was rocked by angry protests. The iPhone factory apologized for the violence against employees. One new employee was paid 8,000 yuan ($1,120) and was set to receive another 2,000 yuan ($280).

China has recorded its highest number of daily Covid cases since the pandemic began,

CNN reported that workers at an Apple iPhone manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, China fled after the facility was locked down due to a COVID-19 outbreak. On October 2, 2022, authorities imposed a seven-day lockdown of the area that houses the Foxconn plant, an order that could hit the iPhone assembler’s production and shipments. 350,000 people work at the plant that some call iPhone City.

Analysts said the chaos at Zhengzhou could jeopardize Apple and Foxconn’s output in the coming weeks. Ivan Lam, senior research analyst at Counterpoint, estimated that between 10% and 30% of iPhone 14 production could be affected in the near term if the situation did not stabilize. The Zhengzhou campus is the world’s biggest iPhone factory and typically accounts for as much as 85% of iPhone assembly capacity, according to Lam’s estimates.

The city, of more than 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures earlier last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases. Workers are panicking over the spread of the virus at the factory and lack of access to official information. Workers are packed side by side much like meat packing workers. It is not clear how many cases of Covid have been identified at the factory. Many scaled fences to escape the iPhone facility by foot.

Apple has started to boost production in other countries, including India, to reduce its dependence on China.