Workers at the Foxconn factory fled the scene after announcing emergency quarantines amid a new wave of COVID-19 infections.
This headquarters delivers millions of iPhones with worldwide destination.
The Foxconn plant in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou (Henan, center), one of the main iPhone assemblers in the world, needs to hire some 10,000 workers to normalize its production capacity after almost two weeks under confinement – still in force – for outbreaks of COVID-19.
The Taiwanese company that supplies the American Apple is trying to attract qualified personnel through incentives such as high salaries for hourly workers and a bonus for former employees who return to the company, according to an exclusive published by the official Global Times newspaper , which cites internal sources of the company. signature.
In crisis
A Human Resources official told the newspaper that the Zhengzhou industrial complex “urgently” needs more workers to recover the pace of production and replace the many employees – they are estimated to number in the thousands, although there are no official data – who escaped from the site to avoid be confined.
The factory has been operating since November 2 in what is called “closed circuit”, which means that employees remain in the complex.
The new workers, who will be employed until mid-February next year, will be paid 30 yuan per hour ($4.2 or 4 euros), an increase from the 23 to 25 yuan the company paid before this crisis.
Another internal source indicated that employees who resigned between October 10 and November 5 will receive a bonus of 500 yuan (70.3 dollars or 67.9 euros) if they return to their posts.
The Foxconn complex remains confined for now, so the company has also announced that the employee dormitories are undergoing renovations to improve them.
Both the workers who return and the new signings must remain in quarantine for a week in hotels, and only then and after obtaining negative results in several PCR tests can they enter the facilities.
Among the models most affected by the situation are the assembly of the iPhone 14 Pro and the iPhone Pro Max , according to the Global Times .
policy controversy
Since 2020, large factories in China such as Foxconn ‘s in Zhengzhou have responded to outbreaks in nearby areas by establishing “closed loop,” which isolates workers for long periods at the facility to avoid contagion from outside and maintain production, thereby which has sometimes caused protests due to poor sanitary conditions or the lack of food.
China remains clinging to the ‘zero covid’ policy, which consists of isolating all those infected and their close contacts, strict border controls, mobility restrictions and massive PCR test campaigns wherever a case is detected.
According to official figures, 5,226 people have died since the start of the pandemic in China, whose authorities maintain that ‘zero covid’ has saved millions of lives. EFE