Exodus from iPhone plant

Beijing: Workers are departing Apple Inc’s biggest iPhone plant in China, seeking to escape hastily enacted Covid measures that left many of the 200,000 staff grappling with inadequate living conditions.

Local authorities from several regions in the central Henan province said they will receive home-going workers from Foxconn Technology Group after strict Covid curbs were imposed at the world’s largest iPhone plant in Zhengzhou to quell an outbreak, according to official posts online.

At least six counties and cities in Henan asked residents who just left Foxconn to contact local authorities before going home.

Workers will be sent to several days of mandatory isolation, according to official posts on WeChat.

Cities such as Mengzhou and Luoyang have arranged buses to ferry workers to isolation sites, according to the posts.

The government of Dagang county has dispatched buses and officials to help ferry employees to quarantine sites for a seven-day compulsory isolation before allowing them to go home, it said in a WeChat post.

Videos and pictures of employees leaving the campus flooded social media over the weekend, depicting local residents offering food and shelter to some of the departing staff. Bloomberg has not verified the authenticity of the content.

Tensions at the Zhengzhou plant underscore the economic and social costs of Xi Jinping’s Covid-zero policy, a rigorously policed system of mass testing and quarantine lockdowns that has fostered growing resentment.

It also shows the potential risk to global supply chains and products from China’s approach, which demands lockdowns, business restrictions and mass testing drives when even one Covid case emerges.

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 cafeterias at the manufacturing site known as “iPhone City”.

At one point, only workers on production lines were given meal boxes, with those infected or afraid to leave their company-provided dormitories given more basic fare like bread and instant noodles, Bloomberg News reported.

It is unclear how many workers were allowed to leave Foxconn.

The company hires many temporary workers from nearby regions to assemble electronics including the latest iPhone 14 devices.

Foxconn and Apple did not immediately provide a comment outside of regular business hours.

Foxconn said on Wednesday that production had not been impacted by what it described as a “small” outbreak.

Closed loops enable companies to stay operational during lockdowns but take a toll on workers, whose movements are severely limited. — Bloomberg