| Translate This News In |
|---|
After several employees left the site due to a Covid epidemic, central China’s biggest iPhone manufacturer in the world informed its personnel on Tuesday that it would treble their incentives if they stayed. As the final major economy to commit to a zero-Covid approach, China continues to implement sudden lockdowns, extensive testing, and protracted quarantines in an effort to contain spreading epidemics.
A large portion of the nation now lives under an ever-changing patchwork of Covid restrictions as a result of new varieties that have taxed local authorities’ capacity to put out flare-ups before they spread.
Since the middle of October, the Zhengzhou facility of Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has been on lockdown. According to the business, staff are being tested daily and kept in the loop.
However, complaints from workers have been making the rounds on Chinese social media, alleging unfavourable working conditions and insufficient virus protection for non-infected personnel.
In videos posted online over the weekend, Foxconn workers can be seen leaving the company’s premises and walking back to their homes in an effort to get around Covid travel restrictions.
The Zhengzhou facility of Foxconn said on its official WeChat account that beginning on Tuesday, workers would earn a daily incentive of 400 yuan ($55) for reporting to work, quadrupling the previous perk of 100 yuan.
If employees show up for work for 15 or more days in November, they will also get extra incentives, totaling 15,000 yuan if they show up every day.
In what it has referred to as a “protracted struggle” against the virus, Foxconn, which provides iPhones to US tech company Apple, has pledged to do more to assist staff and arrange buses to bring them back to their hometowns should they desire to leave.
Local governments in the city’s environs urged evacuees to register with the police if they went back home and to finish a quarantine period of several days.
A few instances were found in the southern semi-autonomous enclave of Macau, which led to the closure of one of its casinos and the announcement of widespread testing of its 700,000 inhabitants on Tuesday.
The city’s faltering gaming sector has just suffered a setback; it had been anticipating a comeback following promises to ease travel between mainland China and the former Portuguese colony this month.
For the second day in a row, China reported more than 2,000 new home illnesses as controls were tightened in response to a wave of regional outbreaks.
Guangzhou, a major industrial center in southern China, imposed partial lockdowns in a number of its districts on Monday in reaction to an increase in cases.
On Tuesday, Guangzhou reported more than 520 new illnesses.
As winter approaches, new outbreaks have also appeared in northern cities close to China’s border with Russia and North Korea.
