Those wild ‘n crazy Taiwanese animators at NMA.TV have produced a video about the events surrounding the recent riot by Foxconn employees at a plant (seemingly more like a labor camp) in China assembling the Apple iPhone 5 and other electronic gadgets.
The ghost of Steve Jobs is a nice touch.
Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin reports on the aftermath of the riot in the city of Taiyuan.
Although the official version of events from Foxconn attributed the violence to a dispute between workers from different provinces, many workers present at the time were certain the violence erupted after a security guard abused a female employee.
One worker told the Associated Press, “Foxconn, some supervisors, and security guards never respect us. We all have this anger toward them and they (the workers) wanted to destroy things to release this anger.”
Workers’ sentiment on China’s online forums was divided, some angry, some joyful. Workers were eager to post photos and make comments on the events. And some workers from other Foxconn plants in Henan, Shandong, and Shenzhen posted letters praising the Taiyuan workers for their courage to start a riot.
Amid the general exuberance, there were a few voices calling on workers to stay calm and be rational. A worker, who said he had been employed at Taiyuan Foxconn for three years, highlighted the failure of the Foxconn trade unions to properly represent workers’ interests. This he said had complicated the longstanding conflict between management and workers. He hoped workers could handle the conflict in a rational manner in order to avoid unnecessary casualties.
This post was immediately challenged by another worker, who responded that workers had not meant to instigate a riot but that they had no other way to address injustice. When they called a hotline to complain about the abusive security guards, for example, they were told their complaint could not be handled.
Although several workers posted demands to set up their own more representative trade union, they are unlikely to gain support from local official unions like the workers from Ohms Electronics did in Shenzhen. Foxconn is a major investor in many inland provinces and government officials are eager to please the world’s largest electronics maker by helping it recruit workers. In addition, one of the reasons [Taiwanese-owned] Foxconn moved its manufacturing bases to China in the first place was to dodge strong unions in Taiwan.
So you might think a blog called Socialist Unity, run by the British trade union activist Andy Newman, would have something to say about a government that is so eager to accommodate a company that treats its workers as less than human and which set up shop in China to avoid dealing with genuine (as opposed to state-controlled) trade unions.
Ah, here we go…
http://www.socialistunity.com/welcome-to-the-chinese-century/
