Foxconn Effort to Ease Workers’ Fears of Covid Led to Tighter Lockdown

Apple Inc.

warned of delays for some new iPhones, with shipments of higher-end models affected in what is usually a peak buying period for its smartphones.

From the beginning of the outbreak in early October up until Monday, Foxconn had stuck to its operating forecast, while trying to persuade terrified employees not to fear the virus and to keep working.

Last week, after scores of workers were filmed fleeing the plant and the government sent teams to manage the crisis, the company said life at the site was returning to normal.

Foxconn’s woes illustrate the dilemma China’s manufacturers face in keeping running while holding at bay more highly infectious Omicron variants—and within the constraints of the country’s rigid zero-Covid policy.

Central to China’s justification for sticking with the policy—and the sweeping lockdowns, mass testing and compulsory isolation it requires—is that the virus is too deadly to be allowed to spread. Fear of Covid is now deeply rooted in a population that has been shielded from the virus—and from any robust, open debate on how to deal with it due to restrictions on free speech.

The official narrative leaves little room to maneuver, though China’s leaders including

Xi Jinping

have acknowledged the need to balance Covid controls with economic growth and people’s livelihoods. Some easing of rules for inbound visitors and mass testing are likely, The Wall Street Journal has reported, but outbreaks will still be crushed through lockdowns, people will still need health passes to access public spaces and tourists will still spend some time in quarantine.

This account of the outbreak at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant is based on interviews with more than two dozen workers and their relatives, as well as company announcements on its

WeChat

account. Foxconn didn’t respond to requests for further comment, and

Apple

didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Most anyone working at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in the provincial capital of Henan would be accustomed to life under zero-Covid. One 27-year-old quality-control worker recounted how she had undergone the compulsory two-day quarantine before starting a three-month contract in August, and a shorter one while on the campus where she lived with many of the 200,000 or so other workers.

Still, the midnight lockdown in work zone G came as a shock, she said.

Working late on the first Friday in October, she and her co-workers were told they couldn’t leave their production unit. She said she stayed there for the next 27 hours, jolting awake several times because of the cold as she snatched what sleep she could.

“The virus had never felt this close. It’s right in front of my eyes,” she posted on social media that Sunday. “I confess, I’m terrified.”

There was no inkling of what would come, she told the Journal.

From the factory, she said she was moved to another block of dorms and quarantined along with many others. Returning to work nine days later, the campus looked different.

The company had sealed off entrances, telling workers to move only between their living quarters and production lines in a so-called closed-loop mechanism. Such bubblelike arrangements have allowed companies including Foxconn,

Tesla Inc.

and

Volkswagen AG

to continue operating in China, even with surrounding areas locked down.

But the complexity of running Foxconn’s iPhone plant, one-and-a-half times the size of Central Park, shows the limits of sustaining the system—and the conflicts companies face to meet production targets while also taking care of workers cut off from the outside world, sometimes for weeks.

Under Foxconn’s closed-loop system, smoking areas were sealed, vending machines switched off and dining halls were closed, workers said. They said they had to take carryout meals back to dorms that for most were at least half an hour’s walk across a campus. The trek gave her blisters, the 27-year-old quality-control worker said.

Still, several other dorm buildings, each with thousands of occupants, had soon been locked down.

Racing against a fast-spreading variant as quarantine quarters filled up, the company added faster rapid-antigen tests to several rounds of mass PCR testing, a move aimed at speeding up identification of positive cases but which some workers said came too late.

As more cases were detected and close contacts taken away for quarantine, the more worried workers said they became.

It didn’t help, they said, that the company kept the number of cases to itself.

“I don’t know how many positive cases were detected each day, but I saw people around me slowly disappearing,” said the quality-control worker.

By late October, many workers began to suspect that the company was more focused on keeping the factory going than on strictly enforcing pandemic controls, according to a production-line manager who oversees about 100 people. When people quarantined at a nearby facility began to return to work, many of the other workers didn’t believe they had all tested negative, he said. Instead, a rumor began to spread that it was part of a plan to mix patients with healthy people to promote herd immunity, he said.

“It’s like, ‘We don’t care anymore, just catch the disease, then you’ll get immunity,’ ” he said, describing how workers were interpreting the company’s approach. “People panicked.”

On Oct. 28, thousands of workers packed their bags and headed out the door on foot, some abandoning the bonuses they stood to earn for completing their contracts. Videos of the scenes spread on social media.

In response, the government offered buses to take them home. On Tuesday last week, workers lined up with their suitcases near the campus. A loudspeaker broadcast the company’s offer to raise bonuses fivefold for any who changed their minds.

“Calm down and return to work. It’s better than going home to a quarantine,” the speaker repeatedly announced.

On its official WeChat account, Foxconn shared stories from recovered Covid patients likening the symptoms to catching a cold and statements by medical experts playing down the dangers of catching the virus.

The quality-control worker said she had felt an urge to join as she watched the weekend exodus from her dorm. But that would mean setting off at night to walk toward her hometown almost 120 miles away. She also worried about how people would react to someone coming from the Covid-tainted plant, and the risk of bringing the virus home to her parents and young daughter.

She decided to stay, thinking it would be safer now there were fewer people.

By Wednesday, five of the eight women in her dorm had gone. She and the two others had tested positive on an antigen test. They took a PCR.

On Thursday, hours before her infection was confirmed, she thought about her 27-hour lock-in early in the outbreak.

“Back then, I didn’t imagine that things could go so wrong,” she said.

—Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to Wenxin Fan at [email protected] and Selina Cheng at [email protected]