Foxconn, Apple supplier in China, suspends work after 2,000 factory workers brawl in dormitory

An undated photo of workers at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. / CBS

(AP) BEIJING - The company that makes Apple's iPhones suspended production at a factory in China on Monday after a brawl by as many as 2,000 employees at a dormitory injured 40 people.

The fight, the cause of which was under investigation, erupted Sunday night at a privately managed dormitory near a Foxconn Technology Group factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, the company and Chinese police said. A police statement reported by the official Xinhua News Agency said 5,000 officers were dispatched to the scene.

The Taiwanese-owned company declined to say whether the factory was involved in iPhone production. It said the facility, which employs 79,000 people, would suspend work Monday and reopen Tuesday.

Foxconn makes iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc. and also assembles products for Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. It is one of China's biggest employers, with some 1.2 million workers in factories in Taiyuan, the southern city of Shenzhen, in Chengdu in the west and in Zhengzhou in central China.

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The fight in Taiyuan started at 11 p.m. on Sunday, "drawing a large crowd of spectators and triggering chaos," a police spokesman was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

Order was restored after about four hours and several people were arrested, said the company, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. It said 40 people were taken to hospitals for treatment.

The violence did not appear to be work-related, the company and police said. Comments posted on Chinese Internet bulletin boards said it might have erupted after a security guard hit an employee.

Photos posted on microblog service Sina Weibo showed broken windows, a burned vehicle and police with riot helmets, shields and clubs.

Phone calls to police headquarters and the Taiyuan city hall were not answered. People reached by phone at restaurants and other businesses in the area said they had no details about the clash.

The company has faced scrutiny over complaints in the past about wages and working hours. It raised minimum pay and promised in March to limit hours after an auditor hired by Apple found Foxconn employees regularly were required to work more than 60 hours a week.

[ratsbutt]

Here is the paradise promised by the GOP for the USA. No unions...no worker rights....just human units of corporate consumption. The Romneys and their paid parrots here on Yahoo are constantly drumming the virtues of a plutocracy where they reap huge rewards and channel those to their version of a Real America. A society of no rules for the 'Creators" and no rights for the middle class which will disappear as we know it today.

[askagain]

The article states that Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers. That is a lot of employed people supporting families. Think how these people would be living without jobs. We do not control Chinese laws. The only other option for many of these people might mean living in poverty and perhaps starving. Ironically, China has a rapidly growing middle class.

[jefforsythe]

Every once in a while one of the female employees of the plant that manufactures Apple's products walks to the top of the plant building and jumps off to her death. The gangster Chinese Communist Party"s solution for this is to put up nets to catch these young ladies. These nets do not always work. Apple is fully aware of these suicides but continues business as usual. This is a typical example of the corporate greed that is now rampant in the Western World. It is quite obvious that the owners of Apple do not need any more money but their greed has possessed them.
It is this greed that has allowed Western investors to make deals with the brutal Chinese Communist Party, turning their backs on the fact that this gangster regime has murdered eighty million of its own people since 1949 and since 1999 has been attempting the genocide of tens of millions of innocent Falun Gong practitioners by the use of torture, slavery, organ harvesting and murder. Knowing what I do about the cruelty of the CCP, I would not want to be in the same room as any of them, never mind doing business with them. This is just my understanding, thank you.