Only hearing about it from sources I wouldn’t trust with a weather report. Anyone got some good places to follow what’s happening? I gather it’s some combination of unpaid wages and covid stuff

  • thetablesareorange@lemmygrad.ml
    83·
    2 years ago

    It’s not really a strike, the factory in Zhengzhou is a huge 200k person live-in factory with dormitories. Because of Covid you have to be quarantined for 4 days before you can begin working, so you’re forced to live on site and you can’t leave or you’ll have to go through quarantine again. Rumors apparently were spread that covid positive people were being housed with non-covid people and it caused a massive riot/walkout of some kind. The plant is currently suffering a massive hiring shortage and only last week claimed it was short 100k workers and offered a series of raises and bonuses. So it’s more of a covid lockdown protest than a labor strike.

    It’s important to remember that this a US company, operating through a Taiwanese subcontractor, and the Chinese government is not involved and often encourages these strikes. Labor disputes and strikes are very common in China, over a million every year. Foxxconn entered American red scare propaganda around 2010, over a series of suicides, mostly with wild claims that the Chinese government produced everyone’s Iphones through slave labor and used it to track everyone, much like you hear about tiktok, and huawei and many other chinese companies. Once Americans found out Foxconn is Taiwanese (their loyal honorary aryan vassal state) it fell out of the right wing news cycle. There were several suicides at the plant, about 9 people in one year but thats out of a total of 1 million foxxconn factory workers. Factories like the one in Zhengzhuo are really small cities of over 200k people, with far lower suicide rates than all 50 US states