Did Chinese IPhone Workers Really Go on Strike?

If 4,000 people go on strike at an iPhone factory in China, will anybody know it? That’s the question at the heart of an ongoing puzzle over whether, in fact, iPhone 5 production was shut down by a labor action in the northern Chinese city of Zhengzhou on Friday.

For most of the world, the news broke on Oct. 5 when China Labor Watch, an influential New York-based workers’ rights group issued a press release claiming a strike had occurred at a plant producing iPhone 5s that “according to workers, involved three to four thousand production workers.”