Workers at Chinese iPhone touchscreen supplier go on strike

John Brownlee ()

Over 2,000 workers in the Chinese city of Suzhou went on strike last week after persistent rumors circled that their employers, Taiwan-based Wintek Corp, would not pay a promised productivity bonus for 2009. They certainly seem to have earned that bonus: the workers build the touchscreens used in Apple’s iPhone, only the most popular and bestselling smartphone on Earth.

According to reports, the workers are outraged, flipping vehicles and damaging facilities in protest. Needless to say, production has halted in the meantime.

It’s hard to imagine this is going to go well for the workers. If conditions at Wintek’s factories are anything like those at Foxxconn’s iPod facilities, most of Wintek’s employees earn less than fifty dollars a month, and work 15 hours a day. They’ve doubtlessly earned whatever meager bonus is being held back. It’s easy to understand their frustration. Too bad the Chinese government isn’t the sort to look favorably upon worker rebellion.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • erica

    15 bucks/month? wow….

  • http://www.toxicspark.com Andrew Macdonald

    Those wages are disgusting. And people in America / England moan about being on £6.50 an hour minimum wage.

  • Mattzook

    Strikes in Communist China don’t last long. The government intervenes, as it wants to avoid the spread of any unrest or public dissatisfaction.

    The government will intervene, for one side or the other: either it forces the employers to agree to better terms for the employees, or government forces an ultimatum for the employees to go back to work (or face imprisonment).

    It will have minimal effect on Apple. This is possibly only 1 factory that Apple outsources to. It might delay production of screens for a bit, but that’s only a small fraction of what Apple orders in a given year.

  • Vopat

    And this is a Communist country how? Totalitarian/authoritarian Capitalist maybe, but not Communist.

  • Guy

    If it was really a Communist country then the factory would be owned by a party official and the workers would be executed by now.

  • MacRat

    Most of these factories are like a college campus. The employees get free room and meals in addition to the wages.

  • Daniel

    It’s a Communist country currently experimenting with open markets. If and when they decide it isn’t working out for them, they’ll stop the experiment. The fact that the longer it goes on, the harder it will be to shut down doesn’t change the fact that it’s a totalitarian, Communistic dictatorship. And no amount of wishful thinking will change that.
    Weird and more than a little sad that people would read about those working conditions and talk about the minimal affect on Apples supply chain. I love my macs but I can live without them. I expect more from Apple.

  • imajoebob

    Any strike in a Chinese city is either a) suicide or b) a government-staged event. I’m leaning toward b). Wintek, a Taiwan company, is probably making a killing on this contract. But since they’re from Taiwan, the Red Army doesn’t own a piece of it. A carefully orchestrated outbreak of labor unrest, whether pure stagecraft or just fomented by false propaganda, might convince Wintek that a government stake in the operation will put a quick end to any problems.

    The Red Army is the Sino Mafia, except it operates above the law, not outside it.

  • mark

    Ain’t Taiwan the country where the politicians rumble over each other in the political arena?

    Those strikes do not mean a thing as they pull open another can of workers. In stead of 15 hours per day they work 18 nd nobody notices a thing of it with its order deliveries.

  • Mattzook

    Confusing at best.

    The factory is in Suzhou, China, a city inside the mainland Communist People’s Republic of China.

    The employees are employed by a Taiwan company. Taiwan is a sovereign republic, a democracy that is backed by the United States of America. China considers Taiwan a rebel state. China threatens to bombard the crap and invade Taiwan to absorb it back into China Proper. Taiwan refuses. Taiwan wants to remain an independent democracy. The USA keeps telling China to STFU and stop threatening to annex Taiwan, because the minute you invade democratic Taiwan which is an American ally, the USA will declare nuclear war on your Communist Chinese butts. The Communist Mainland China then backs down on its threat. This has been going on for over 50 years now.

    Confusing at best. Because Taiwan owning a factory inside Mainland China…. is kinda like the Islamic Republic of Iran owning an Iranian missile factory in Southern California.