Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of smartphones and other electronics, is failing to complete orders for the iPhone 14. Hundreds of workers walked out of the facility in Zhengzhou last month in protest of dangerous working conditions. China’s export superpower position is founded on companies like Foxconn that assemble the world’s consumer electronics, toys, and other commodities. “It’s clearly evident that closed-loop manufacturing in Foxconn only helps to keep COVID from spreading to the city, but does little (if anything) for the factory employees,” Aiden Chau of the advocacy group China Labour Bulletin said in a statement. Foxconn’s iPhone factories have long been chastised for their working conditions. Laborers are forced to work long hours for little remuneration. The factory’s harsh working conditions were widely exposed when a number of workers committed suicide, and the business responded by installing nets outside the building to solve the issue. The governing Communist Party is attempting to handle the new epidemic of disease without shutting down manufacturing and the rest of the economy, as it did in early 2020. It employs “closed-loop management,” in which workers live in their workplaces with no outside interaction.
