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Chinese Employee Loses iPhone Prototype, Kills Self
tlhIngan writes "Physical intimidation of a Foxconn employee, 25 year-old Sun Danyong, and a possibly-illegal search of his house may have led to suicide after an iPhone prototype in his possession was lost. Foxconn is Apple's long-time manufacturing partner for the iPhone. Entrusted with 16 iPhone prototypes, Danyong discovered that one was missing and searched the factory for it. When it didn't turn up, he reported the incident to his boss, who ordered his apartment searched. There are reports of physical intimidation by Foxconn security personnel. This ended tragically on Thursday at 3 AM, when Danyong jumped from his apartment building to his death." VentureBeat notes that "Apple exerts immense pressure on its business partners [to] help it maintain secrecy." An Apple spokesperson said this to CNet: "We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."
There's an app for that...
...probably the only way he could save his family from being threatened.
Illegal searches, intimidation, then "suicide"... Uh huh... yeah...
Your bosses were mean to you: sue them, find another job, learn to live with it.
Yes, because that works so well in China, right?
Get some fucking compassion, idiot.
There is now another liver available for transplant.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
"We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect"
Because nothing says dignity and respect like working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour...
A-Bomb
When it didn't turn up, he reported the incident to his boss, who ordered his apartment searched. There are reports of physical intimidation by Foxconn security personnel.
The question is, will this lead to companies being less, or more likely to look upon Foxconn positively when considering an OEM who will keep their new prototype under wraps?
"The iPhone 4 - it's to die for!"
So tell me, what color is the sky in your world?
right, "suicide".
weinersmith
This is the high pressure culture of secrecy taken to its logical conclusion in a country with little worker protection. I highly doubt Apple has any legal responsibility in this, but they do share a portion of the moral culpability along with the management of Foxconn. Did the senior management of Foxconn push the man out a window? No, but they created the corporate culture in which it happened. Likewise, Apple have worked with Foxconn for years now; they created the high pressure culture of secrecy and then turned a blind eye to how Foxconn enforces it.
It give me the creeps knowing how Apple does business. It is obvious that this busniess partner is evil and they continue to work with them.
Hah! Like Apple treats its iphone app developers ?
Why not? Believe it or not people are able to sue when they are harmed by somebody, even in China.
You realize that families who lost their children as a direct result of incompetence and negligence haven't even been able to seek redress under the Chinese system? You really think some poor bastard working for an industrial conglomerate stands a chance? I think you've wandered away from the reservation on this one....
Parents devastated at the loss of sons and daughters, most born under China's strict "one couple, one child" family planning policy, have sought a government accounting and a proper explanation as to why so many schools fell down.
Police and local officials have blocked parents of the dead children from staging protests to seek information. An Amnesty International report this week chronicles instances in which parents were detained by police while seeking answers from courts.
Lawyers who took on such cases came under pressure to drop their involvement.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Are you factoring in the culture in this case? Honor means a lot to Asians. For them, failure of this magnitude may have only one acceptable response: seppuku, or the equivalent for the locale. It may seem a little drastic for Americans - is a product or company worth that much? - but we're obviously, and thankfully, not the model for every society.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
I always equated that more with Japanese culture than Chinese.
Not sure how illegal a search of the guy's apartment would be if they own the place.
I seem to remember an article on here about foxconn "city", everyone ate,worked and lived on the foxconn campus.
That's an interesting question. This Digitimes article published the day before he died, but after he had reported the loss, claims that Apple and Sony are cutting back on Foxconn orders, while Dell, Asustek, and HP are climbing on board.
I don't like playing cultural imperialist, but something about current Asian cultures seems to me to be broken: this isn't exactly the first suicide of its sort, or even an uncommon phenomenon, just one of the more high-profile cases (since it's Apple, and a senior guy). Western culture isn't immune to these effects either (cf. high-profile financial advisors committing suicide in 2008-2009)
Um, this wasn't a suicide. And it's a nice bit of cultural stereotyping to picture asian people happily falling on their swords. It is deeply insulting (or you're deeply stupid) to think that someone of any culture would commit suicide just for losing / selling a production prototype.
Funny thing is, we know exactly where it went- it popped up on ebay recently and was big news. It was also dead as a doornail- nobody could load firmware onto it. Yeah, it was a fuckup, but Apple could easily recover that phone if they wanted to, either legally or by simply saying "please", or giving the seller what he paid for it (unlikely.)
Which do you think is more likely? That he was riddled with guilt over the loss of a prototype worth maybe a few hundred dollars in parts and little intellectual property value (since there are millions of copies in the world?) and jumped....or was pushed over the balcony ledge by a bunch of company goons who were told to make an example of him to employees, with a public story that "our employees are so dedicated to your security, they'll..."? And really, how impartial do you think the investigation is going to be? In China, these companies own and run entire cities that make Mall of America look like a strip-mall. They don't even need to pay off the police- they already employ them.
Please help metamoderate.
Jesus Christ Kid! Wake up and smell the Coffee! It's the Noughties! I'm not paying you to think about flower power and peace among the animals.
Consider this mac: Supply and Demand!! If there's one thing that human history has taught us, it's that people are cheap, but profits are forever. You know how many guys like this guy there are? You know how many iPhone prototypes there are? You don't need to do a lot 'a math to see how this is gonna work out. Man, I could tell you stories about coffee beans and Nicaraguans in the 80's. Fucking great times!
Holy shit! The only time you need to you to jump out a window is when the stock is at 5c and your pretty sure the guy is like, your spitting image. The lesson here is that if the pressure is this fucking high, you need a safety valve, otherwise known as a fall guy. In fact, I'm betting this guy was that guy! Sweet play.
You know, you should be thinking about other people. You should be thinking about how to make money off of 'em, or else get them outta your way. You see a bus load of traumatised kids. I see a several lifetimes worth of prescription medication sales. You see tragedy, I see opportunity.
Shit happens, deal with it. It's all part of the game. Wen just bought a new sports car. Hu just sealed the Intel deal. Yao just jumped out of ten story window. Who cares! It's all just gossip material to spend over Espresso lattes. The second you stop to moralise over rights, wrongs, lifes, deaths; is the second you stop making money. You gotta straighten those suspenders, up the sperm count on the deal, and keep kickin' ass, so people know your the hardest asshole around.
Prime example, Steve fucking Jobs. Guy's such a ball buster that he's got subcontractors breakin' down apartment doors and throwing suckers outta windows just to keep the latest indigo and cyan iDink case covers an international fucking secret. And people still think he's Michael Jackson! You will never have those stones.
So, Put it all on AAPL, Bernanke's got the kettle on. And get yourself a dog!
May the Maths Be with you!
Or was he helped out the window?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Now why are we talking about this when this event occurred in China? (not Japan)
The troll with karma.
More to the point, being roughed up by goons, interrogated, and having your house illegally searched are pretty stressful across all cultures...
"We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."
Yeah right. Thats why Apple employs chinese workers who fear for their lives. Chinese labor is employed because its virtually slave labor. Its cheap, easily controlled, and cut throat business practices allow them to dispose of workers at will.
Either this guy was a spy, or he made an honest mistake. Whatever the case may be, its said that he took his life.
I still find it sick that Apple can say they require their suppliers to treat workers with dignity and respect in one breathe, but in practice they really do not care because look at who they employ!
Why isn't the difference in workers' rights and environmental abuse priced into free trade agreements?
I have no problem with work going to China, as long as the employers there also have to pay for health care, disability, U.S. minimum wages, and safe workplace enforcement; cannot dump their waste into rivers, etc.
Without those restrictions, U.S. workers cannot hope to compete based on price.
So work done in those countries, and items manufactured in those countries, should probably incur tariffs big enough to compensate for all those other disparities.
China has their Yuan fixed to the dollar, rather than allowing it to float freely. If you take any value around GDP in China (or India) of a common money, then it is total nonsense. As it is, many economist think that the Yuan should be 300-400% higher (i.e. about 1.5-2 yuan/dollar instead of the 7 yuan / dollar that the run).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is curious that nobody here has stopped to mention what influence China's notorious lack of respect for IP law might have to do with this incident. I'm not a huge fan of patents and the like, and there are plenty of ways for large, well-funded corporations to end-run patents in "the West", but if one were to lose an iPhone prototype in the United States, one would reasonably assume that it would be difficult for anyone to do anything meaningful with it without some serious reverse-engineering (unless someone from China stole it and took it overseas). Sure, it would be a problem, but there would be a lot of hoops for the tech thieves to jump through before they could make bank on their crime. If you could prove that they stole the thing and used it for their own commercial success, you could probably sue them anyway, and you might even win years down the line (bring your warchest).
Now imagine losing a valuable prototype of an unreleased product in China. How it got lost and to whom (in the event of a theft) would have everything to do with whether or not the prototype could be recovered. In the event of a theft, the thief's backers and influence with the government would have everything to do with whether or not the stolen unit could be used for the purpose of manufacturing cheap knock-offs with release dates comparable to the real product. Foxconn has to know this and had to have been operating under the assumption that the prototype might have fallen into the hands of a well-connected rival that could have (and would have) mass-produced units based off the prototype, which is something neither Apple nor Foxconn would have liked very much. Naturally they would go to every effort to keep a prototype out of "enemy" hands since they know their production models will be copied as soon as they hit store shelves anyway; much of their profit will come from the lead time they get on their cloner competition (it would take a few months to ramp up production of a rip-off). That lead time is all you really get before the cloners flood the market (at least domestically if not internationally). Losing a prototype cuts down on your lead time. In the case of the iPhone prototype, by how much, we do not know. A hasty cloner willing to make a sloppy release might be able to roll out knock-offs before the actual iPhone product itself hits the market, giving people the option to buy a potentially-buggy pre-release version of the product before the actual product hits shelves. Apple wouldn't like that very much, especially not if the knock-offs found their way onto eBay and beyond. Foxconn wouldn't like that much either.
Not that any of the above justifies roughing the guy up or pushing him towards suicide, but seriously, this whole issue has to be viewed in the proper light. Foxconn and Apple can't just sue whoever turns up with the prototype. In all likelihood, they will never see it again until millions of units just like it show up in Chinese warehouses.
If Foxconn had any reasonable expectation of being able to file suit against a well-heeled competitor who magically turned up with the prototype and began furiously cranking out knock-off products, maybe they wouldn't have tormented the poor soul allegedly responsible for losing the prototype. Oh sure, being able to rip off anyone's tech is all fun and games when you're poaching the tech from foreign competitors, but when cloners start cannibalizing the creations of their domestic neighbors, things aren't so fun anymore. At least, not for the Chinese, and especially not for that one poor schmuck to whom Foxconn entrusted iPhone prototypes.
"Honor" for "Asians"? Which, of the many Asian cultures, are you talking about? If Japan, then sure, to some extent this is the case. It was more so in years past, but hey, things change.
In China, I'm not so sure. I'm not as familiar with Chinese cultural mores, not having lived there, but everything I've read suggests that "seppuku" (which, incidentally, is a Japanese word) is much less of a popular out than it is/was in Japan. I bring up the significant possibility that Sun Danyong's death might not have been suicide at all, but even if it were, I strongly suspect that it was motivated less by ideas of honor than it was by ideas of being completely and royally screwed -- i.e., desperation, not clearing one's name so much as escaping a terrible situation.
As the South Korean character Captain Sam Pak says in a M*A*S*H episode, "Suicide? That's the Japanese. We don't do that schtick." (Ironically, the part was played by the late Japanese-American actor Pat Morita.)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
In other words,
If I can help Apple deliver new iPhone models by defenestration of brown or yellow people, then that's what I'm going to fucking do.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I haven't read all of the posts yet, but one solution seems to have slipped the collective mind.
Maybe he DID steal it, the bullying was warranted, and he killed himself to avoid going to jail.... ...I'm just sayin....
Your top five are not in Asia. You may not think of it as such, but Kazakhstan is most definitely an Asian country.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Then why build your product in China?
What's next, Apple, making MacBooks in rural Iran?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm afraid you're being pretty naive, my friend. Even here in the United States the chances of you being successful and winning a judgement in a wrongful termination suit are miniscule. In a totalitarian state like China, they'd be infinitesimal, and that's assuming that the government didn't go ahead and toss you in a jail cell for a few years just for having the temerity of bringing the suit in the first place.
This ain't rocket surgery.
That they will do anything that it takes to prevent this from happening again.