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Covid outbreak in Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou: Grappling with inadequate living conditions, workers are leaving Apple Inc.’s biggest iPhone plant in China. Strict Covid curbs were imposed at the world’s largest iPhone plant in Zhengzhou to quell an outbreak. Local authorities from several regions in the central Henan province said they will receive homebound workers from Foxconn Technology Group.
The rules included daily tests and a ban on dining in the canteen halls, the Post reported last week. Workers had turned to social media to complain about living conditions, saying they were having to stay with Covid-positive colleagues, and raising concerns about further transmission and under-reporting of cases.
Viral social media posts, some from the workers themselves and others from passers-by, showed groups of people walking along the highway and through small country roads, as local residents along the route put up stalls to distribute food, water and clothes to them. Those heading home would have to undergo seven days of centralised quarantine followed by three days of home isolation, the statements from the various city authorities said. Such public letters had been sent by at least seven counties and cities in Henan after social media posts showed workers walking along as they dragged luggage behind them.
Apple’s iPhone plant run by Foxconn in Zhengzhou, has grappled with a COVID-19 outbreak and placed under lockdown. In this video uploaded on WeChat with a hashtag “The Great Escape in real life(现实版大逃亡),” workers are escaping from the Foxconn campus and trying to return home pic.twitter.com/HDdMdmMUGk
— Munkyoung Shin (@munkyoung_s) October 30, 2022
Discontent has been brewing among staff at Foxconn’s main factory in Zhengzhou, where the emergence of Covid cases saw it go into a closed-loop system. Food became a source of unrest after the Taiwanese company that makes most iPhones sold around the world shut down cafeterias at the manufacturing site known as “iPhone City.”
The Foxconn factory, which employs around 300,000 people, earlier rejected widespread rumours that a large number of workers had contracted Covid-19. There had only been a small outbreak at the plant, it said in a statement on October 26, adding that the impact on operations was “controllable”.
The discontent comes at a crucial time for Apple, which launched the iPhone 14 during an unprecedented slump in global electronics demand. Any disruption at Zhengzhou threatens to snarl Apple’s finely orchestrated supply chain. Thousands of components from Europe to Asia are shipped into Zhengzhou, assembled manually into devices, and then shuttled off to the rest of the world.
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