When last we encountered Homer Simpson, he had voted for Mitt Romney (“He did invent Obamacare”), been shown Romney’s previously secret tax returns, been sucked through a giant tube to the assembly line of a Chinese factory making American flags, found Ned Flanders working next to him and jumped out a window, only to be foiled in his suicide attempt by a net surrounding the building.
That last detail is of course based on the actual nets installed by Foxconn— manufacturer of Apple iPods, iPads, and iPhones– at some of its facilities in China to deal with a rash of employee suicides.
Now workers at one Foxconn plant have expressed their unhappiness in a more collective manner. The company closed its plant in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan after thousands of employees rioted.
Foxconn said the trouble started with a personal row that blew up into a brawl. But some people posting messages on a Twitter-like site said factory guards had beaten workers and that sparked the melee.
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“The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities and we are working closely with them in this process, but it appears not to have been work-related,” Foxconn said. Hon Hai said about 2,000 workers were involved.Comments posted online, however, suggested security guards may have been to blame.
In a posting on the Chinese Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo, user “Jo-Liang” said that four or five security guards beat a worker almost to death.
Another user, “Fan de Sa Hai”, quoted a friend from Taiyuan as saying guards beat up two workers from Henan province and in response, other workers set bed quilts on fire and tossed them out of dormitory windows.
M.I.C. Gadget, which reports that Foxconn’s Taiyuan plant is “the main location where 57 million units of iPhone 5 need to built” annually, has photos and videos.
