Shortly before midnight on Sunday, a fight among assembly-line workers at the Apple supplier, Foxconn, escalated into a riot, involving some two thousand members of the staff, and perhaps the guards, that reportedly left forty people injured.
The state-news service said that five thousand police moved in to restore control. The plant, which has seventy-nine thousand workers in the coal-country city of Taiyuan, shut down. Reporters at the gates saw broken windows and paramilitary police with riot shields, helmets, and batons guarding the entrance, while a loudspeaker urged calm. After twenty-four hours, Foxconn reopened the plant Tuesday.
Though most of the iPhone assembly is done elsewhere, workers said that the iPhone was being made there, too, so the story leapt onto front pages. Anything attached to Apple gets more than its share of attention, but in this case, the Apple factor is far less interesting than what this instance of labor unrest suggests about the months ahead for China.
The melee has been chalked up to several possible causes: Foxconn says it “appears not to have been work-related” though that’s a bit of a semantic dodge when the workers live together in dormitories and rarely have reason to leave the workplace. Online reports—which should be treated with skepticism until better sources turn up—suggest that it was triggered by guards who beat up a worker. In either case, as one worker put it to the Times, “I think the real reason is they were frustrated with life.”
