Workers walk out of Apple’s largest iPhone assembly factory in China after the Covid outbreak forced staff to lock down the workplace.
Video shared online shows about 10 people jumping a fence outside manufacturer Foxconn’s plant in the central city of Zhengzhou.
Chinese people and businesses are grappling with President Xi Jinping’s strict zero-covid policy.
It is not clear how many cases of Covid have been identified at the factory.
But in the past week, Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s Henan province, reported 167 locally transmitted infections – up from 97 a week earlier, according to the news agency.
The city of about 10 million people was put on partial lockdown, as China continues to use strict lockdown measures to combat Covid.
Foxconn, which serves as a supplier to US-based Apple, has hundreds of thousands of workers at its Zhengzhou complex and has not provided official numbers on how many are affected.
The Taiwan-based company claimed on Sunday that it would not prevent workers from leaving.
However, in footage shared on Chinese social media, the workers allegedly made long walks to their hometowns to avoid being caught on public transport. was shown fleeing the field to begin with.
A 22-year-old worker, surnamed Zia, told that there was “absolute chaos in the dormitories” she and her colleagues were being housed in. “We jumped the plastic fence and the metal fence to get out of the campus,” he added.
The workers also claimed that the area around the plant was locked down for several days, with Covid-positive workers subjected to daily testing and quarantine to try to contain the outbreak.
Last week, on October 19, Foxconn announced that it was banning all dine-in catering at the Zhengzhou plant and requiring workers to eat in their rooms.
At the same time, the company told reporters that it was maintaining “normal production” as the plant ramped up production of the latest iPhone 14 models.
“The government agreed to resume food service to improve the convenience and satisfaction of employees’ lives,” Foxconn said in a statement on Sunday.
It added that for those wishing to return home, “[the plant] is cooperating with the government to organize employees and vehicles to provide point-to-point orderly return service for employees from today.” “
Under China’s strict zero-covid policy, cities have been given powers to act quickly to contain the spread of the virus. This includes anything from full-scale lockdowns to regular testing and travel restrictions.
Many had hoped President Xi would scrap the legislation before the end of the year, but at the recent 20th Congress of the Communist Party, he made clear that was unlikely to happen soon.
