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A brawl involving as many as 2,000 workers forced Foxconn to close its Taiyuan plant in northern China late on Sunday, and left a number of people needing hospital treatment.

The Taiyuan plant, which employs about 79,000 workers, makes parts for automotive electronics and assembles various electronic devices, according to Woo. Other staff sources said it makes parts for and assembles Apple's new iPhone 5, released last week.

Direct elections at enterprise trade unions will become increasingly commonplace in Shenzhen, the deputy head of the city’s trade union federation, Wang Tongxin, predicted following the highly publicised election of a new trade union chairman at the Omron electronics factory in Shenzhen this weekend.

Although relatively few enterprise trade unions have direct elections at the moment, Wang said, the union federation would heavily promote direct elections so that in the future such events “will not be news, nor pioneering, but rather just normal work practice.” The union is already targeting some 163 enterprises in the city, each employing upwards of 1,000 workers, for direct elections over the coming year, he told the Southern Metropolis Daily.

The election came about as a direct result of a strike by several hundred workers at the plant two months earlier on 29 March demanding better pay and benefits as well as a more representative and effective trade union at the plant.