On Saturday, December 12, enraged workers stormed an iPhone manufacturing plant on the outskirts of India’s IT hub Bengaluru after their night-shift. The Times of India called it a “rampage.” Workers at the factory, owned by the Taiwanese company Wistron Infocomm Manufacturing, turned over vehicles and broke windows at the facility, located on the outskirts of the southern city of Bangalore.
The workers say they haven’t been paid in four months and that they have been forced to work overtime, working up to 12 hour shifts to produce iPhones that they cannot afford. The factory employs over 10,500 people. Currently, less than 2,000 of Wistron’s workers are employees while the rest are on contract. The company had introduced 12-hour shifts at the plant in October, up from the earlier eight-hour shifts. According to the Times of India, several thousand workers participated in the protest after the night shift. “Mobs were seen breaking glass panes and doors,” the TOI reports, “turning cars topsy-turvy and attacking the offices of senior executives.”
One worker told the TOI: “While an engineering graduate was promised Rs 21,000 per month, his/her salary had reduced to Rs 16,000 and, subsequently, to Rs 12,000 in the recent months. Non-engineering graduates’ monthly salary had reduced to Rs 8,000. The salary amount being credited to our accounts have been reducing and it was frustrating to see this.”
On Friday night the employees started discussing their salaries while working on the floor. Some claimed to have received only Rs.500 in their bank accounts. The anger turned to rage by the time the shift ended. The protest was repressed, and about 100 workers were arrested and damages are estimated at $7 million.
Following the incident, a Karnataka government probe revealed several lapses like the company not informing the Karnataka factories department of the new work shifts, a glitch in its attendance system causing employees’ presence to be incorrectly registered for two months, underpayment of wages to contract workers and housekeeping staff, and making women staff work overtime without legal authorisation.Wistron has since admitted to and apologised for the mishandling of wages and taken steps to remedy the situation. These include firing the vice president who used to oversees its business in India and starting an anonymous hotline for complaints.
Apple began assembling iPhones in India in 2017, in large part due to ability to hyper-exploit Indian workers. However, it has a 1 percent share of the total smartphone market in the country, since the iPhones are too expensive for nearly all Indian consumers.
The Wistron corporation had received 43 acres in the industrial area of Narasapura from the Indian government, with the promise of providing employment and investment. A spokesman for the Wistron group said, “We have complied with the law and are helping the authorities with their investigation.” From the United States, Apple said it is “ dedicated to ensuring everyone in our supply chain is treated with dignity and respect.” Of course, that “dignity” doesn’t include a living wage or dignified working conditions.
The secretary of the All Indian Trade Union Congress said that the blame lies with “the brutal exploitation of workers” and the dire conditions in the iPhone sweatshop.
This workers’ explosion is part of a general uprising taking place in India. The largest general strike in history took place just a few weeks ago. And mass farmers protests have taken place and intensified over the last month. On Monday, farmers’ mobilizations cut off access roads to the Indian capital.
The government of nationalist Narendra Modi is promoting labor laws that seek to cut wages and benefits to workers. For years, Modi has been the candidate of Indian capital. Through his tenure, from giving land allocations to capitalists, opening up Indian markets to multinationals and chipping away at labor protections, he has sought to pass a series of neoliberal reforms to favor the industrial employers. Modi also seeks to destroy India’s agricultural system, opening it to large agribusiness transnationals. About 500 million people work directly and indirectly in the agricultural sector, and 50 percent of the population of 1.3 billion people depend on this sector for their survival.
The ultra-right wing Modi government has been developing a strong nationalist, xenophobic, and racist policies against Muslims. Taking advantage of the confrontation with China, Modi is also trying to weld together a reactionary “national unity” to advance an attack on the workers. The coronavirus, in turn, has hit India hard; it now has the world’s second-highest number of cases and deaths.
These explosive demonstrations by the workers of the city and the countryside show the Indian government’s mounting difficulties in attacking the historic conquests of the country’s working class and agricultural workers.
( Left Voice is a US socialist news site and magazine. Article slightly modified by us based on inputs from an article in Quartz by Ananya Bhattacharya.)
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A report by SabrangIndia, “Wistron Factory Vandalism: Karnataka Gov’t registers FIR against 7,000 employees”, adds (extract):
21 Dec 2020: The Karnataka Government has pressed criminal charges against 7,000 employees, including 5,000 contract workers of Wistron Private Limited over the destruction and violence at the Winstron factory on the night of December 12.
The first registered IT union in Karnataka called Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) has demanded the immediate withdrawal of criminal charges against the employees of the iPhone manufacturing plant.
KITU has been vocal about the approach of the Karnataka Government as they have turned a blind eye to the litany of labour law violations by the company and supported the police action of filing criminal cases against several contract workers. It is appalling that despite the Apple Corporation having accepted the shortcomings of their branch office, the workers are all set to be prosecuted.
A demonstration organised by Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) was joined by KITU office bearers condemning the arrests and police repression on workers on Sunday, December 20.
According to the Financial Express, the Wistron administration admitted that some workers were not paid correctly, or on time at its Kolar iPhone manufacturing plant. “Since unfortunate events at our Narasapura facility we’ve found that some workers were not paid correctly, or on time. We deeply regret and apologize to all of our workers. We are removing the Vice President who oversees our business in India. We are also enhancing our processes and restructuring our teams to ensure these issues cannot happen again,” said Winstron in a statement.
