Armed paramilitary police had to be called in to quell a 2,000-man brawl at
the troubled Foxconn factory in
Northern China that makes parts for Apple’s
iPhone 5, among other products.
Around 40 workers were hospitalised in the riot, which began at around 11pm on
Sunday night in one of the factory’s dormitory blocks.
What started as a dispute between a worker and aggressive security guards in
one of the factory dormitories spiralled out of control as thousands of
workers streamed off their shifts and joined the fray against the plant’s
1,500 security guards.
It took four hours for the police to bring the situation under control,
according to a statement from Foxconn, the owners of the plant in Taiyuan,
Shanxi province.
According to accounts from witnesses posted on the Chinese
internet, workers from different parts of China battled the security forces
and each other, while grievances over pay and working conditions were also
aired. The factory’s supermarket was also destroyed.
A video shot on a camera phone showed mostly young male workers shouting and
screaming while running across the factory’s campus in the dark.
On Monday, the 79,000-worker factory was shuttered while at least 35 police
and paramilitary trucks remained parked outside the front gate.
“The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities and we
are working closely with them in this process, but it appears not to have
been work-related,” Foxconn said.
The hi-tech plant, which opened in December 2004, primarily makes moulds for
manufacturing a range of products, but also engineers alloy components for
consumer electronics and mobile phone parts.
However, the plant has had a troubled history. Workers went on strike in March
over pay, and in the run-up to the release of the iPhone 5, a Chinese
newspaper exposed a series of poor working practices.
The Shanghai Evening Post sent one of its reporters undercover into the
Taiyuan factory, where he trained for seven days and then spent three days
on the factory floor assembling the new iPhone’s metal “back plates”.
He wrote: “The whole dormitory smells like rubbish when I entered.
There was uncleared rubbish outside every room. Cockroaches crawled out from
my wardrobe and the bedsheets are dirty with ash. All the windows are
barred.”
He reported that workers were fired if they were found to be carrying any
metallic objects, and that workers had to sit still while working.
“This is the new iPhone 5 back plate, you should be honoured to have the
chance to make it,” his supervisor told him, and he was given the job of
marking his back plates with a pen.
“An iPhone 5 back-plate passed in front of me almost every three seconds. I
had to pick up the back plate and mark four points using the oil-based paint
pen. Every ten hours, I had to finish 3,000 back plates. After several
hours, I had terrible neck pain,” he wrote.
Foxconn admitted to the Shanghai Evening Post that “the working environment
on the production line can be improved” and promised to investigate the
problems. “We are not perfect but we are improving every day,” it added.
On Monday a Foxconn spokesman declined to comment on whether the Taiyuan
facility made parts for the iPhone 5 but said that it supplied goods to many
consumer electronics brands.
According to the Shanghai Daily newspaper, schools in Huai’an in Jiangsu
province were asked by the Chinese government to send their students to
“intern” at Foxconn for 1,550 yuan (£155) a month.
Demand for the iPhone 5 is so high that one Foxconn factory, in Zhengzhou,
Henan province, had to recruit an additional 200,000 workers and turned to
the local government for help.
