Apple assembler Quanta Computer faces a revolt by workers stuck inside a Shanghai factory locked down due the Chinese Communist Party’s quixotic “xero-COVID” crusade.
Workers at Apple supplier Quanta Computer’s factory in China hop the turnstiles in April 2022, fed up with quixotic ‘zero-COVID’ lockdowns
Bloomberg News:
Violent clashes, mounting infections and vacant factory floors: the turmoil that’s engulfed tens of thousands of workers at an Apple Inc. supplier in Shanghai is a troubling symptom of China’s extreme efforts to keep factories humming during its worst Covid outbreak since 2020.
Trapped in a bubble for almost two months, locked down by government decree and walled off from the outside world, Quanta Computer Inc.’s mostly low-wage workers are demanding more freedom and beginning to revolt against their overseers, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Hundreds of workers have clashed with guards. A large contingent, worried that their supplies would run out should the lockdown persist, flooded past guarded isolation barriers earlier this month in search of daily necessities, according to several employees. Over the past weekend, media reports went viral of a large group storming a dormitory housing Quanta’s Taiwanese managers after a dispute over the prolonged lockdown and pay — triggering an hours-long standoff confirmed by several workers within the compound.
The incidents underscore how sentiment is souring on a lockdown that’s up-ended the lives of 25 million Shanghainese since March.
Technovanguard Take: Again:
• There’s no such thing as zero-COVID, but this year is the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th party congress, so the farce will continue until the politics no longer dictate tilting at windmills. Then COVID will be allowed to wash through China, as it already has around much of the world. – Technovanguard, May 9, 2022
• In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not disappear. There is no such thing as zero-COVID. Duh.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will very likely become endemic, yet pose less danger over time. People will acquire immunity via vaccines (effectiveness TDB) and naturally as they contract and recover from variants like omicron since the partially-effective vaccines permit not only transmissibility, but also breakthrough infections. Influenza and the four human coronaviruses that cause common colds (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu vaccines and acquired immunity means that sane societies tolerate the unavoidable seasonal deaths and illnesses they bring without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite return-to-work delays, etc.
At which point, if ever, will some people decide that wasting away their short lives in abject fear of a bad flu, very likely engineered by China and partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is a hysterical self-defeating overreaction? – Technovanguard, December 16, 2021
• The real virus is the panic. – Technovanguard, March 9, 2020
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