MCLC: riot at Foxconn factory

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: riot at Foxonn factory
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/24/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/business/global/foxconn-riot-underscores-
labor-rift-in-china.html

Riot at Foxconn Factory Underscores Rift in China
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER

SHANGHAI — The images and video began to appear on Chinese social
networking sites early Monday: buildings with shattered windows,
overturned police cars, huge crowds of young people milling about in the
dark and riot police in formation.

The online postings were from a disturbance late Sunday that shut down a
manufacturing facility in Taiyuan in north China, where 79,000 workers
were employed.

State-run news media said 5,000 police officers had to be called in to
quell a riot that began as a dispute involving a group of workers and
security guards at a factory dormitory.

The unrest was noteworthy because the factory site is managed by Foxconn
Technology, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturers and an
important supplier to companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft and
Hewlett-Packard.

A spokesman for Foxconn said the company was investigating the cause of
the incident. But analysts say worker unrest in China has grown more
common because workers are more aware of their rights, and yet have few
outlets to challenge or negotiate with their employers.

When they do, though, the results can be ugly and, because of social media
and the Web, almost instantly transmitted to the world in their rawest and
most unfiltered form.

“At first it was a conflict between the security guards and some workers,”
said a man who was reached by telephone after he posted images online. The
man said he was a Foxconn employee. “But I think the real reason is they
were frustrated with life.”

The company said that as many as 2,000 workers were involved in the
incident but that it was confined to an employee dormitory and “no
production facilities or equipment have been affected.”

Nonetheless, the plant was closed, the company said.

Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan and employs more than 1.1 million
workers in China, declined to say whether the Taiyuan plant made products
for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week. A spokesman said the
factory supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands. An employee at
the Taiyuan plant said iPhone components were made there.

Supply-chain experts say most Apple-related production takes place in
other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong
and Henan.

Apple referred questions to Foxconn.

Labor unrest in Taiyuan, in northern China’s Shanxi Province, comes as
strikes and other worker protests appear to be increasing in frequency
this year compared with last year, said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for
the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking
collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China.

Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s
economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from
financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when
money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to
lower-cost cities in the interior.

But the level of labor unrest in China this year has not yet matched 2010,
when a surge in inflation sparked a wave of worker demands for higher pay,
Mr. Crothall said.

The Taiyuan protest comes at a politically delicate time in China, with a
Communist Party Congress expected in the coming weeks to anoint a new
general secretary and a new slate of members for the country’s most
powerful body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

The government has been tightening security ahead of the conclave through
measures like restricting the issuance of visas and devoting considerable
resources to watching and containing disturbances like the recent
anti-Japanese demonstrations.

But the calendar may also be on Foxconn’s side. A weeklong public holiday
starts this weekend to mark the country’s national day on Oct. 1.
Factories across the country will close to allow workers to go home — and
in the case of Foxconn’s Taiyuan factory, the dispersal of workers to
hometowns could allow tempers to cool.

Mr. Crothall said that while the cause of the latest dispute in Taiyuan
remained unclear, his group had found an online video of the police there
using a megaphone to address “workers from Henan” — the adjacent province
to the south of Shanxi. The police officer said that the workers’ concerns
would be addressed.

Disputes involving large groups of migrant workers are common in China. In
some cases, workers protest after believing that they have been promised a
certain pay package and traveled a long distance to claim it, only to find
on arrival that the details were different from what they expected. In
other cases, workers from different provinces with different cultural
traditions coming together in a single factory have clashed over social
issues or perceived slights.

The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to
improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor
abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together to improve conditions, raise pay
and improve labor standards, particularly since March when the Fair Labor
Association, a monitoring group invited by Apple to investigate
conditions, found widespread problems
<http://www.fairlabor.org/report/foxconn-investigation-report>.

Mr. Crothall said workers in China had become emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to
injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment
still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.
The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay
dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred
when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

David Barboza reported from Shanghai, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.