More Apple for the day

Matthew Yglesias has a Slate article about more troubles at Foxconn:

Foxconn Technologies, best known as one of Apple's leading component makers, but a supplier to many other electronics firms as well, has had to shut a plant down in China after scuffles between workers and security guards turned into a full-blown riot.
Jacobin, America's hot new radical journal, had a very informative piece about recent labor unrest in China that I think is a great table setter for this conflict. Conditions in contemporary China have much more in common, structurally speaking, with conditions during the heyday of western labor activism than does anything about the Chicago teachers strike or the apparent American Airlines sickout. The rapid pace of Chinese industrialization means the average wage in a Chinese factories has managed to lag behind the average productivity of a Chinese factory worker (roughly speaking because it's dragged down by the absymal wages and productivity of Chinese agriculture) which creates a dynamic ripe for windfall profits, but also for labor activism. The repressive nature of the Chinese state is an unpromising ground for union organizing, but by the same token Chinese labor organizations have much less to lose (in terms of union-managed pension funds, union-owned buildings, etc.) if they break the law with "wildcat" strikes and the like.
To hazard a guess about how this will play out would just be setting myself up for mockery later, but it's one of the key dynamics that explain why China isn't just going to have another 25 years like the past 25 years. Very rapid growth via continuous urbanization and industrialization and wage repression works— and the Chinese have in many ways proved it works better than anyone ever thought— but it's still a necessarily self-limited process. 

David Barboza and Keith Bradsher have an article in The New York Times about the subject:

Foxconn Technology, a major supplier to some of the world’s electronics giants, including Apple, said that it had closed one of its large Chinese plants after police were called in to break up a fight among factory employees. The company said several people were hospitalized and detained by the police after the disturbance escalated into a riot.
Unconfirmed photographs and video that was circulated on social networking sites purporting to be from the factory showed smashed windows, riot police and large groups of workers milling about. The Foxconn plant, in the city of Taiyuan, in central China, employs about seventy-nine thousand workers.
A Foxconn spokesman declined to specify whether the Taiyuan facility made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week, but he said that it supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands. Foxconn said it employed about 1.1 million workers in China. The disturbance is the latest to hit Foxconn, a key supplier of products to Apple and other global electronics companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Microsoft.
Foxconn, which is part of the Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories following reports about labor abuse and work safety violations. Apple and Foxconn have worked together in the last year to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards.
Disturbances at factories have become increasingly common in China, rights groups say, as laborers have begun to demand higher pay and better conditions.
Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China, said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened. “They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said.
The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, Hong Kong media reported then.
Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

Rico says he thought the whole Communist thing was to create a 'workers' paradise'; doesn't sound like it worked out that way...