There's a huge labor strike happening at Foxconn's Zhenzhou factory in China, involving thousands of workers.
Source: chinalaborwatch.org
There's a massive labor strike happening right now at Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory, China Labor Watch reports, and it's very much tied to the way the iPhone 5 is produced, as Gizmodo noticed.
The 3,000-4,000 striking workers mostly come from the onsite quality control line, where workers were most directly affected by "overly strict demands on product quality" implemented by Foxconn over the holiday:
According to workers, multiple iPhone 5 production lines from various factory buildings were in a state of paralysis for the entire day. It was reported that factory management and Apple, despite design defects, raised strict quality demands on workers, including indentations standards of 0.02mm and demands related to scratches on frames and back covers. With such demands, employees could not even turn out iPhones that met the standard. This led to a tremendous amount of pressure on workers. On top of this, they were not permitted to have a vacation during the holiday.
Source: youtube.com
That account echoes what an undercover journalist from the Shanghai Morning Post that worked at Foxconn for two weeks reported:
I’m being assigned to mark placement points on the iPhone 5 back-plate using an oil-based paint pen. I’m being scolded many times for spilling too much oil on the markings. My roommate has being assigned to paste the masking tapes of not more than 5mm wide on the right spots that I have marked. And he has being scolded many times for pasting them too slow. Our supervisor said that these works [sic] were actually being assigned to females workers with nimbler fingers, but due to too many workers have resigned lately they have no choice but to assign these jobs to male workers.
