Labor disputes turned into full-blown street protests don’t seem to have solved much for Foxconn employees at factories in China, with the Taiwanese company’s interests intersecting perfectly with the will of the Chinese Communist Party, reversing the zero-COVID strategy to the point where employees with symptoms of the disease are lured with wage bonuses for refusing COVID testing.
According to information obtained from reliable sources, Foxconn employees who until recently were convinced that they were being subjected to an experiment initiated with the approval of the Chinese Communist Party, in an attempt to find out what happens if the COVID pandemic is allowed to run unchecked in a relatively large community, are being lured with salary bonuses to continue working even with obvious symptoms of illness. All for the sake of achieving the iPhone 14 production plan and saving the collaboration with Apple, essential to China’s role as the world’s electronics factory.
According to Foxconn, employees on production lines are given N95 masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19. But workers complain of a lack of real community control, with little or no screening of employees with COVID symptoms virtually guaranteeing infection in dorm rooms, where up to eight people sleep in bunk beds.
According to information obtained from sources, cases of infection among roommates are no longer being addressed by extracting them from the community and carting the sick to specialized centers. Instead, employees with mild symptoms of illness are “asked” to remain on the job despite symptoms.
Employees so motivated remain working shifts of up to 11 hours, even with symptoms of fever, assembling iPhone 14 phones for consumers in Western markets.