Riot in Foxconn’s China Factory; Dozens Arrested
By Liu Jiayi | June 8, 2012, 5:56am PDT
Summary: Disputes between the workers and security staff in Foxconn’s Chengdu factory turn into a thousand-people riot, according to reports.
HONG KONG: Disputes between the workers and security staff in Foxconn’s Chengdu factory turned into a thousand-people riot on June 4, according to a Ming Pao‘s report.
The Hong Kong-based newspaper said that felt being poorly paid by Apple’s biggest supplier and badly treated by its security staff, thousands workers in the southwest dormitory of the factory in central China went haywire Monday evening.
Some workers got angry and fought with the security staff and dorm administrators who were investigating some theft incidents. After they beat up and drove the staff out of the building, thousands of workers joined in by chanting, throwing empty beer bottles off the building, sabotaging dorm equipment, and igniting firecrackers.
The authority sent more than a hundred riot police and put several dozens of workers under arrest by 11pm. The government also called in private security forces to help “stabilize the situation“, according to Zheng Zhiwen from a security company in Chengdu.
“We went upstairs with the policemen and arrested those mobs, it was exciting,” said a Foxconn security staff in his Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) account.
But the Chengdu Municipal Police Authority responded in its official Weibo that four workers from Foxconn were detained overnight for fighting with some restaurant owners and no one was hurt in the incident.
Foxconn currently pays its workers about $1.5/hour, and some of them work 76 hours a week and 11 days in a row.