This whole Foxconn suicide net thing is really screwed up. I was there in person working for another US tech company, not Apple, but in the same Shenzhen facto

This whole Foxconn suicide net thing is really screwed up. I was there in person working for another US tech company, not Apple, but in the same Shenzhen factory compound during the big hubbub. It wasn't nearly as bad as the news reported. 1. Foxconn at its worst was having fewer suicides per-capita among its workers than most populations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis (sourced from ABC News and The Economist) The rest is anecdotal first-hand data from me, so feel free to ignore it: 2. The working conditions were bad, but not THAT bad. It was a shitty factory job where you were under a lot of scrutiny, but probably not as much as working at Amazon today. 3. The pay at those Foxconn jobs was great. People were making multiples of what they could earn back home for way less effort. Foxconn factory workers thought of themselves as hot shit, much like factory technicians used to think of themselves in the USA before all those jobs disappeared. It looked like there was a nice corporate ladder you could work your way up, too, since they'd filter things through multiple layers of increasingly-elite technicians/engineers on their way to me. The place looked like a lot like a college campus when I was there. Tons of young, happy-looking people working hard and getting paid well for it. IMO this all stems back to that debunked and retracted NPR report talking about armed guards and a prison-like atmosphere. The worst thing I had to deal with in Shenzhen was there not being enough butter in the cakes at the factory's onsite bakery when I bought my coworkers a couple of big birthday cakes.