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I don't wish to make light of any suicides or potential worker mistreatment at Foxconn, but it's important to keep in mind that when the Foxconn suicide nets ma
by Inconel 9y ago
I don't wish to make light of any suicides or potential worker mistreatment at Foxconn, but it's important to keep in mind that when the Foxconn suicide nets made the news there were 14 reported suicides that year. Foxconn has something around one million employees. It's possible that the number of suicides was under reported but it's important to keep in mind that China's suicide rate is somewhere around 22 per 100k residents and the US's hovers somewhere around 10-13 per 100k residents.
14 suicides for a company of Foxconn's size doesn't seem particularly unusual, except for maybe being below national average.
- dilemma 9y agoThis is a BS comparison. People do not usually kill themselves at work.
- Inconel 9y agoI'm not an expert on suicides so I'm going to take your word for that as it seems logical to me. You've piqued my interest though and I'd love to learn where most suicides take place, I would assume at home. With that being said, and to make clear I'm not an expert on Foxconn's corporate workings, but doesn't Foxconn offer housing at many of their campuses? It was my understanding that their larger factories are basically Foxconn cities where employees both live and work. I would assume many of these suicides took place at Foxconn facilities but not while actually working.
- bshimmin 9y agoAccording to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988/Mass-suicide-protest-at-Apple-manufacturer-Foxconn-factory.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9006988... the, er, modus moriendi appears to be throwing themselves from the roofs of the Foxconn buildings.
- Inconel 9y agoI stand corrected then. Just to be clear, I wasn't meaning to blindly come to the defense of Foxconn, I don't know enough about them to form an educated opinion, although if I'm being honest it would not surprise me if they have some rather horrid working conditions, but I see the Foxconn suicide stats thrown around often without any context of wider suicide rates.
- bshimmin 9y agoI'm totally with you - I saw the Foxconn suicide rates at the time and thought both "That sounds very troubling" and then "How many employees do they have? Actually that sounds quite low, perhaps this is a bit of a storm in a teacup", and then I did a bit of googling and concluded that people throwing themselves off the roof of their workplace, probably in protest over the working conditions, ought to be considered a different sort of suicide from the ones that normally make up national suicide rates. On the other hand, employing north of a million people to do assembly work probably comes with all sorts of challenges.
- dilemma 9y agoIf you look at photos from for example Tim Cook's visit to Foxconn you'll see that the factory is extremely clean and give the impression of having excellent working conditions. The problem is how work is regimented: employees are not allowed to talk to each other while on a shift, and they get moved to New dorms randomly where they know no one, and may never see because they're on different shifts. It's a lack of human contact, a very different type of working condition.
- differentView 9y agoThey're expected to act like robots. They'll soon be replaced by actual robots.
- _jal 9y agoWell, the factories may well be extremely clean, but PR pictures would look exactly the same no matter what the conditions. Either that, or industrial farming is really lovely and caring: https://www.perdue.com/perdue-way/animal-care/ https://www.perdue.com/perdue-way/animal-care/ .
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amdavidson 9y agoMost people do not live on a factory campus the size of a small city where the definition of "at work" becomes a bit hazy.
- 43224gg252 9y agoI think that's the parents point....
- lightbyte 9y agoGee I wonder if that contributed at all.
- mcintyre1994 9y agoWell going by the statistics above the people living on that factory campus city had a lower suicide rate than the national or US average right?
- sjwright 9y agoPeople do not "usually" kill themselves at work or at home or on bridges. But in unusual situations, some do. Let's put it another way: Chinese people who work at Foxconn are less likely to commit suicide than Chinese people who do not work at Foxconn. (And meanwhile, this controversy is continually discussed as if Foxconn only made products for Apple... I wonder how many people suicided to make your Xbox.)