Chinese workers for Foxconn, the Taiwanese company responsible for manufacturing Apple's new iPhone 5, are back to work after 2,000 of them rioted earlier this week.
Workers tell Bloomberg News that Foxconn is using security guards armed with riot gear to maintain order. "The guards here use gangster style to manage," Fang Zhongyang, 23, said outside campus gates. "We are not against following rules but you have to tell us why. They won't explain things and we feel like we cannot communicate with them."
Conditions at factories in China that make Apple products have been under scrutiny for the last two years, when a rash of worker suicides occurred. Harsh conditions, long hours, corrupt supervisors and low pay caused low morale.
After worldwide exposure of these conditions, Foxconn chairman Terry Gou has improved the situation at many factories, but those improvements have yet to take place at smaller sites, like the one in Taiyuan, where the riots happened this week.
Riots are likely to reoccur, reports The Washington Post. "Such riots have become in some ways inevitable," said Liu Kaiming, a labor expert in Shenzhen, China, a major manufacturing area. "It's no longer simply a matter of raising the wages."
Young workers have higher expectations for working conditions and treatment, but fewer workers are available, since Chinese workers are becoming wealthier and more educated, and the technology continues to change at faster and faster rates.
Workers on the assembly line are under great pressure to perform complex and exacting tasks without error, for hours at a time.
But many workers say their greatest complaint is abuse from management.
"It's not about the money. It's a problem of management. It's a mess," said Wang Zhiqian, a recruiter for Foxconn and former assembly line worker there. "The guards often abuse their power over the workers. We attract many fewer workers now than in 2010. People would rather work at a hotel or other places. It's not a lack of workers in these areas - it's a problem of spiritual emptiness," he told The Washington Post.
"It's definitely not a happy place."
