Apple supplier Foxconn: Production will resume tomorrow
Production at the Taiyuan factory was halted due to a riot that occurred last night. Foxconn says there were no employees deaths related to the incident.
Foxconn, which builds many Apple products, told CNET that while it had shut down its Taiyuan factory due to a riot on early Monday, the facility would resume production tomorrow.
The company also said in a statement e-mailed to CNET that there had been no deaths related to the incident.
Foxconn was forced to shut down the northern China factory after a riot broke out at 11 p.m. local time, possibly sparked when a guard struck a worker, and didn't get under control until 3 a.m. The riot involved roughly 2,000 workers out of a total of 79,000 employees at the factory.
Roughly 40 individuals were taken to the hospital and an undisclosed number of individuals were arrested. Foxconn declined to comment on the reason behind the riot. In fact, it doesn't describe the event as a riot at all, despite the number of workers involved. In its statement, the company variously referred to the violence as an "incident" and a "personal dispute."
"The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities and we are working closely with them in this process, but it appears not to have been work-related," the company said.
The riot comes amid increased scrutiny and criticism of the working conditions at Foxconn, an issue that has spread back to Apple, which employs the factory to build its iPhones and iPads. In addition to rabid Apple fans, last week's
Earlier this month, a Shanghai Evening Post journalist claimed to have gone undercover at the Taiyuan plant. He described his orientation, plant security and his job, which was supposedly to manufacture the back plate of the iPhone 5.
Back in March, the head of human resources at the Taiyuan factory reportedly told a South Korean newspaper that Foxconn had "just got[ten] the order" for the iPhone 5. That was just a few weeks after a reported strike involving hundreds of workers over a pay dispute at the Taiyuan plant.
David Hamilton contributed to this report.