Thousands of Foxconn employees rewarded with more than a month’s salary to leave the company without scandal

Following scandals reported in the international press, Foxconn initiates an exceptional reputation-saving plan, rewarding resignations of newly recruited workers to fill iPhone assembly lines with up to $1,400.

Presumably, even as it quietly looks for new opportunities to move iPhone production out of China, Apple is showing resignation at missing at least part of the winter shopping season, informing the public that availability of the iPhone 14 series may be in short supply in the immediate period ahead, especially for the very popular iPhone 14 Pro model.

According to information obtained from sources, about 20,000 of the 200,000 employees recruited for China’s largest iPhone 14 factory, located in the Zhengzhou region, have left employer Foxconn after being rewarded with the equivalent of $1,000 for simply quitting, or another $400 for quietly evacuating using company buses.

The wholly exceptional measure was reportedly taken after the grievances of the very large collective of workers degenerated into full-blown street protests, quelled only by the forceful action of rapid response crews. Such measures are normally taken by the Chinese Communist Party only to “restore social order” in urban areas, not to quell protests by employees of a private company.

A primary factor in triggering the riots was allegedly the suspicious attitude of Foxconn administrators, who deviated from the official Party line by tolerating the spread of COVID infection among employees. Thus, only symptomatic sufferers were removed from the community and taken to quarantine centres, ignoring the results provided by mandatory COVID testing generating a veritable psychosis among employees who, perhaps rightly, came to believe that they were being turned into guinea pigs for a large-scale experiment designed to determine what happens if the COVID pandemic is allowed to run unchecked within a relatively large community with no opportunity to observe good social distancing practices.

But the element that has brought employee discontent to the “boiling point” appears to be the non-payment of bonuses already promised to employees for ignoring alarmist rumors and the addition of long overtime hours.

Asked for an official position, Foxconn management blamed the current labor dispute on a “technical glitch,” saying it would reward newly hired protesting employees up to $1,400 in exchange for resigning and leaving the company on agreed terms.