Foxconn Workers Getting Raise With Apple Subsidies

hackingbear writes "Workers at Taiwanese electronic outsourcing manufacturer Foxconn are getting a pay raise after a series of 13 suicides, including three in three consecutive days. According to an article by state-run newspaper China Daily, Apple concluded that the main cause of the suicides is low wages. (The media has also attributed the suicides to a variety of other factors — everything from the semi-military style of management, to long overtime, to China's one-child policy, and Foxconn paying too much compensation to the family of suicide workers, thereby encouraging copycat suicides.) Apple plans to subsidize raises using its own products (Google translation; Chinese original here) — the first one being the iPad. This would raise the outsourcing cost from 2.3% to 3% of the iPad's sales price. The article does not say the amount of the raise per worker, but it is rumored to be about 20%, according to other Chinese news sources."

Comments

Re:How about reduce their hours by 20% instead...

[vlm]

hellish working conditions

everything from the semi-military style of management,

Military troops have a certain method for dealing with officers that push the troops too hard. Of course it happens in the movies more often than real life. Probably.

I wonder if some of the "suicides" were not actually suicides and the "workers" were actually "semi-military" lead/foreman/supvr level ...

In the USA, for cultural reasons folks resolve their differences by being firearms to work, and between the physical evidence and the cameras its pretty obvious after the fact who did what. Maybe in China its more culturally traditional in those situations to test your boss's human powered flying ability or something equally hard to prove.