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Ninth Suicide At iPhone Factory
shar303 writes "A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21-year-old worker was the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms."
Don't know if you all saw this or if it was on Slashdot at all, but Engadget has a full, human-done English translation of the article written by a reporter who went undercover at the factory.
Living With a Nerd
Foxconn has over 400,000 employees. The suicide rate in China was ~13 out of 100,000. So that means Foxconn has a suicide rate (if the year continues on this pace) that is less than half of the country average.
Yeah, China's suicide rate is really high period. 13.9/100000 according to wiki. With a population of 400k, this particular company will need more than 4x more suicides this year before this becomes a real issue.
It sucks, but the people who are there are usually fleeing even worse conditions in rural china.
People act so surprised by this, as they buy their high-complexity electronics from wal-mart at dirt cheap prices.
See the Chinese news reports cited below where the undercover reporter both connects the dots for you and, if you work for a living, gives you a terrifying glimpse of your future.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/19/the-fate-of-a-generation-of-workers-foxconn-undercover-fully-tr/
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?
I wonder how many Happy Meal Toy factory employees off themselves in a year?
Also: according to Wikipedia, Foxconn also makes "Intel-branded motherboards for Intel Corp.; various orders for American computer manufacturers Dell and Hewlett-Packard; motherboards for UK computer manufacturer Zoostorm; the PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3 for Sony; the Wii for Nintendo; the Xbox 360 for Microsoft, cell phones for Motorola, the Amazon Kindle, and Cisco equipment."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I was a little taken back because I thought this happened in Taiwan, as I don't remember hearing anything about 8 people in Taiwan killing themselves making Apple products. But no, it happened in China, so it's just business in China as usual
This is also reported by the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/technology/22suicide.html?src=mv
Steve jobs once developed a factory that was almost entirely automated, requiring a very minimum number of employees to build 20,000 computers a month. they spent alot of time and energy developing and refining the process, and it was an achievement that he was really proud of..
Except they didn't sell 20,000 Next cubes a month. Probably not even in the first year!
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/02/26/73121/index.htm
From the article "Says Jobs: ''I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.''"
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
And they must have it pretty good compared to us poor folks in Cleveland, since they average about 150 suicides of working-age adults per year.
I am officially gone from
Here's a source. Foxconn has 486,000 employees according to fairly reliable sources.
According to this 2007 WSJ article, they had over 450,000 factory workers, 270,000 of which were at a single 2x1mile site.
In other words, the suicide rates for Foxconn workers is slightly below average.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The situation in China is hardly "unregulated". The problem is that the attitude in China is a bit more nationalistic. They view human casualties as an appropriate cost for ensuring the strength of the nation as a whole. Market competitiveness is very important to them as their world standing (particularly in manufacturing) is a point of pride for them.
Bollics on the unions.
Really. The US has labor laws to protect workers. Unions where useful in the past but the law protects workers.
Sorry but when my company had to pay a Union worker $200 to watch us plug in powerstrips and set up our booths at convention in Chicago any desire for Unions went out the window.
Also Toyota other manufactures have plants in the US that are none Union. The workers are well paid and seem happy.
I do not believe that Unions are part of the solution anymore.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They killed themselves while at the factory. It does not count (if any) the number of employees who killed themselves at home, while the overall China stat o f 13 per 100,000 counts all suicides.
Bull.
Could you be any more fanboyish and defensive? The videos come from a Chinese news source, and they don't give a frak about Apple, HP, or anything else. They are reporting about a Suicidal factory and don't mention any brand names at all. Not even once. The Chinese reporters are talking about it, because there's a real problem at Foxcon that does not exist in their other factories.
Watch the video - workers are supposed to get a 10 minute break every hour, but the managers took away the privilege. No wonder they feel burned out
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Communism has no government. The workers make decisions democratically about what items to make in their factory, and then make those items.
Of course such a system would never work outside of Marx's book. In the real world either there would be undirected chaos, or there would be a dictator (or oligarchs) who would take advantage of the situation and become the central leader --- which is what happened to the Soviet Union. In theory the "soviets" (groups of workers) were supposed to have a voice in their local factories and communities, similar to a democracy, but in reality it became a top-down system where the workers voices were ignored.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Says one stuck in the 1980s.
You could try actually learning what Marx et all were actually about. What Russia (and China, now) are displaying are [b][u]NOT[/u][/b] anything [i]close[/i] to communism.
I'm not saying it would work. But I am saying, well, exactly what I just said.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Literally that same factory makes stuff for Sony, MS, Nintendo, HP, Dell... It's not exclusively an Apple factory. It is easier to infer that though, with these sensationalist stories that claim to be about promoting the welfare of Chinese workers but are really about smearing Apple.
Victorian workhouse conditions are clearly not what we want to see, but it is in no way unique to Apple.
How would you consider using taxpayer funds to bail out billionaires not government abuse?
Or governments forbidding people to get married based on color (past) or sex (present)?
Capitalism is not necessarily democratic. It can be fascist - capitalists made money under the Nazis. (No wonder it's called "filthy lucre.")
And then we have the current state - corporatism.
Throw in shareholder liability. People will then have their own self-interest at stake in making ethical investments, instead of feeding the ponzi scheme of exploding mortgages.
In case it wasn't clear, my point is that fast food workers are not treated this well at all. I worked at McDonald's, and we got one 30 minute break no matter how many hours we worked.
Le français vous intéresse?
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of our school funding situation here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."