SHANGHAI — General Motors‘ joint venture in Shanghai has maintained production amid the city’s lockdown by asking workers to sleep on factory floors and getting passes for trucks to continue deliveries, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Such measures are a “closed-loop” management process, which China’s financial hub has asked companies to adopt to stay open during a two-stage lockdown to battle its COVID-19 outbreak.
Workers sleep, live and work in isolation from the rest of the world to prevent virus transmission. A similar system was used at the Winter Olympics in Beijing to seal event personnel off from the public.
In another development, auto supplier Aptiv told workers at one of its Shanghai facilities that supplies Tesla and GM’s Shanghai joint venture to head home on Tuesday because of the need to enforce COVID-19 controls, people briefed on the measure told Reuters.
The Aptiv closure came on the second day of a lockdown in Shanghai, home to 26 million people and a major hub for manufacturing of vehicles and other goods. The city has instituted tough controls on movements of people to try to control the spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant.
Aptiv declined to comment on the production suspension. “I can confirm that we are following all government orders and not impacting customers’ production,” an Aptiv spokesperson said. Tesla, GM and SAIC did not have immediate comment.
