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<header style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 10px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">US factory boss held hostage by workers in Beijing
</header><section class="storyimage" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 10px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">
AP Photo: Andy Wong. Beijing workers held their US boss, Chip Starnes, hostage for 4 days demanding severance pay.
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1 hr ago</time> By Louise Watt of Associated Press</section></section>
<section style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 10px; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><section style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 1.6em; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.4; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: block; position: relative;">BEIJING — An American executive said Monday he has been held hostage for four days at his medical supply plant in Beijing by scores of workers demanding severance packages like those given to 30 co-workers in a phased-out department.
Chip Starnes, 42, a co-owner of Coral Springs, Florida-based Specialty Medical Supplies, said local officials had visited the 10-year-old plant on the capital's outskirts and coerced him into signing agreements Saturday to meet the workers' demands even though he sought to make clear that the remaining 100 workers weren't being laid off.
AP Photo: Andy Wong. American Chip Starnes, co-owner of a factory in China, looks out from a room where he's being held hostage by his workers.
"I feel like a trapped animal," Starnes told The Associated Press Monday from his first-floor office window, while holding onto the window's bars. "I think it's inhumane what is going on right now. I have been in this area for 10 years and created a lot of jobs and I would never have thought in my wildest imagination something like this would happen."
Workers inside the compound, a pair of two-story buildings behind gates and hedges in the Huairou district of the northeastern Beijing suburbs, repeatedly declined requests for comment, saying they did not want to talk to foreign media.
It is not rare in China for managers to be held by workers demanding back pay or other benefits, often from their Chinese owners, though occasionally also involving foreign bosses.
The labor action reflects growing uneasiness among workers about their jobs amid China's slowing economic growth and the sense that growing labor costs make the country less attractive for some foreign-owned factories. The account about local officials coercing Starnes to meet workers' demands — if true — reflects how officials typically consider stifling unrest to be a priority.
Huairou district and Qiaozi township governments declined to comment.
AP Photo: Andy Wong. US Embassy employees were at first denied entry to see Chip Starnes whose employees at his factory in China are holding him hostage demanding severance pay.
"As far as I know, there was a labor dispute between the workers and the company management and the dispute is being solved," said spokesman Zhao Lu of the Huairou Public Security Bureau. " I am not sure about the details of the solution, but I can guarantee the personal safety of the manager."
Starnes said the company had gradually been winding down its plastics division, planning to move it to Mumbai, India. He arrived in Beijing last Tuesday to lay off the last 30 people. Some had been working there for up to nine years, so their compensation packages were "pretty nice," he said.
Some of the workers in the other divisions got wind of this, and, coupled with rumors that the whole plant was moving to India, started demanding similar severance packages Friday.
Christian Murck, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said he wasn't familiar with Starnes' case, but that such hostage-taking was "not a major problem" for the foreign business community.
"It happened more often say 15 years ago than today, but it still happens from time to time," he said. "It rarely leads to personal harm to the managers involved, but there are cases when it has in years past."
AP Photo: Andy Wong. An unidentified US Embassy employee and a Chinese official walk by the gate at Specialty Medical Supplies, where American Chip Starnes, co-owner of the plant, is being held hostage by his own employees.
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