Lockdown Boosts Bonuses For China iPhone Factory Staff Who Stay
After numerous employees left the site due to a Covid epidemic, the largest iPhone manufacturer in the world in central China informed its personnel on Tuesday that it would increase their earnings if they stayed.
As the final major economy to commit to a zero-Covid strategy, China continues to implement sudden lockdowns, extensive testing, and protracted quarantines in an effort to contain spreading epidemics.
A large portion of the nation now lives under an ever-changing mosaic of Covid restrictions as a result of new varieties that have taxed local authorities’ capacity to put out flare-ups before they spread.
Since the middle of October, the Zhengzhou facility of Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has been on lockdown. According to the business, staff are being tested daily and kept in the loop.
However, complaints from workers have been making the rounds on Chinese social media, alleging unfavorable working conditions and insufficient virus protection for non-infected personnel.
In videos posted online over the weekend, Foxconn workers can be seen leaving the company’s premises and walking back to their homes in an effort to get around Covid travel restrictions.
According to Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant’s official WeChat account, employees will begin receiving a daily incentive of 400 yuan ($55) for reporting to work on Tuesday, quadrupling the previous subsidy of 100 yuan per day.
If employees show up for work for 15 or more days in November, they will also get additional bonuses, totaling 15,000 yuan if they show up every day.
In what it has referred to as a “protracted struggle” against the virus, Foxconn, which provides iPhones to US tech company Apple, has pledged to do more to assist staff and organize buses to transfer them back to their hometowns should they desire to leave.
Local governments in the city’s environs urged evacuees to register with the police if they went back home and to finish a quarantine period of several days.
A few instances were found in the southern semi-autonomous enclave of Macau, which led to the lockdown of one of its casinos and the announcement of widespread testing of its 700,000 inhabitants on Tuesday.
The city’s faltering gaming sector has just suffered a setback; it had been anticipating a comeback after promises to ease travel between mainland China and the former Portuguese colony this month.
For the second day in a row, China reported more than 2,000 new home illnesses as controls were tightened in response to a wave of regional outbreaks.
Guangzhou, a major manufacturing hub in southern China, imposed partial lockdowns in a number of its districts on Monday in reaction to an increase in cases.
On Tuesday, Guangzhou reported more than 520 new infections.
As winter approaches, new outbreaks have also appeared in northern cities close to China’s border with Russia and North Korea.
