Ninth Suicide At iPhone Factory 539
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. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [engadget.com] of the article written by a reporter who went undercover at the factory.
Foxconn doing better than Chinda (Score:4, Informative)
Re:TechCrunch called bullshit yesterday (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Read the reports. See your future. (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [engadget.com]
Re:Don't know if you all saw this. (Score:3, Informative)
Or... (Score:5, Informative)
... 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."
So it's Foxconn, in China, not Taiwan (Score:1, Informative)
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
Re:TechCrunch called bullshit yesterday (Score:1, Informative)
This is also reported by the NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/technology/22suicide.html?src=mv
Re:Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [cnn.com]
From the article "Says Jobs: ''I'm as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.''"
Re:TechCrunch called bullshit yesterday (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:TechCrunch called bullshit yesterday (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a source [cnn.com]. Foxconn has 486,000 employees according to fairly reliable sources.
According to this [wsj.com] 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.
Nationalism (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Apples / Oranges? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Nationalism (Score:4, Informative)
Is that's true, then why did the Chinese government start an investigation after suicide 6? Why is the news reporter saying Foxcon has management problems, and that it's destroying lives of their young people, and should be sharing some of it ~500 million earning with the workers? Sounds like concern to me --- not the cold-hearted "oh well, that's life" you described.
Re:Communism necessitates totalitarianism, of cour (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Apple. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Apple. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Apple. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)