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Today's Top News
Nets Slung Around Apple Factories to Deter Suicidal Employees
SHANGHAI - Protesters have made a traditional Chinese funeral offering to the dead at the headquarters of Foxconn, the makers of Apple's iPad, after the 11th suicide attempt - nine of them successful - at the company's factories so far this year.
The spate of suicides at Foxconn has highlighted concerns over working conditions inside the giant Longhua factory, where 300,000 workers assemble goods for clients including Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Dell and Nokia. (REUTERS/Robert Galbraith) Li Hai, a 19-year-old man from Hunan province, fell to his death from the roof of a dormitory building at Foxconn's Longhua factory on Tuesday, leaving the world's largest electronics manufacturer in crisis.
The spate of suicides at Foxconn has highlighted concerns over working conditions inside the giant Longhua factory, where 300,000 workers assemble goods for clients including Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Dell and Nokia. The death comes as Apple, which has not commented, prepares to launch the iPad in Australia.
The Longhua factory is the biggest in the world and is responsible for 20 per cent of exports emerging from Shenzhen, the one-time fishing village now one of the capitals of the world's manufacturing industry.
In the lobby of Foxconn's headquarters in Hong Kong, two dozen activists laid mannequins to rest and conducted funeral rites. ''We are staging the protest because of the high death rate [at Foxconn], with an abnormal number of workers committing suicide in the past five months,'' said Debby Chan, a spokesman for Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour.
The latest death came a day after Foxconn admitted it had paid ''insufficient attention'' to the wellbeing of workers and promised to hire 2000 therapists.
''We are not a sweatshop,'' said Foxconn's founder, Terry Gou, who rushed to the factory to manage the crisis. The 59-year-old, who founded Foxconn in 1974, added: ''We are doing a lot every day and we are confident the situation will soon stabilise. A manufacturing team of 800,000 people is very difficult to manage.''
In response to the bad publicity, workers have been told to sign letters promising not to kill themselves and even agreeing to be sent to psychiatric institutions if they appear to be in an ''abnormal mental or physical state for the protection of myself and others'', according to Taiwan's CTI cable TV channel.
Nets were also reportedly being hung around buildings to deter suicidal employees.
Although the number of suicides is statistically in line with the Chinese average for young people, the rate of cases appears to be gathering speed. China has been transfixed by the problems at one of its prize companies, and security camera footage of one suicide victim, a 24-year-old woman named Zu Chengmin, walking unsteadily out on to the roof of a Foxconn building on her way to her death was aired on the main news bulletins.
''You cannot compare the situation with the national average suicide rate,'' said Jin Shenghua, a professor of psychology at Beijing Normal University, who is now advising the company. ''When the rate of suicide jumps rapidly it is alarming. You can only compare this with the situation in other similar factories.''
Nine Chinese social sciences professors said in an open letter to Foxconn: ''[The deaths] force us to question the future of the 'factory of the world' and the new generation of migrant workers.
''This new generation of workers is better-educated, has higher dreams, more thoughts and can feel greater suffering.''
Telegraph, London; Agence France-Presse
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77 Comments so far
Show AllHoly crap! How desperate do you have to be to commit suicide over your job? I can no longer look at my Apple the same way...
In the United States, Apples no longer grow on trees.
They do in some places. I get so many I have to give them away. Depends on where you live in the US, I guess.
It's a different world over there. They don't have many opportunities for jobs and the pressure to make more money in their burgeoning "capitalist" system must be intense.
Interestingly, it wasn't too long ago that a similar thing happened in France, of all places. If memory serves, it was because the company was implementing longer work hours and putting more pressure on the employees to produce.
Indeed, I just found this:
"Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of electronics products for Apple and many others, has reported 9 suicides among its workforce and is fighting allegations of being a sweatshop.
"It’s not the only tech company with a suicide problem, France Telecom’s is much higher, with 46 suicides, and now a government investigation.
"Both sets of suicides are blamed on work place stress."
http://tinyurl.com/33k7ryb
Of course, there is work place stress here in the USA. I haven't heard of any mass suicides, but Americans tend to be more individualistic, preferring to off ourselves (and each other) alone.
Capitalism at its very best!!!! Whether it is factory workers or veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the purpose is "Greed and Power".....Why do you think American Capitalists abandoned the American Work Force? They wanted a controlled labor force with higher profits in mind.....Notice that nothing in the article explained work hours or wages!
Let's just put up nets and hire psychologists.
From farmers to factory workers, the suicide rates climb. The Asian media can be just like the American media in ignoring these fatalities lest they hurt the corporate bottom line. I saw the rise of acceptance in yuppie style capitalism in China. This tragedy could be a wake-up call. China needs to pull out of PNTR with the US and halt the borrowing from the US.
This is a depressing story about how the effects of capital and the inherent sadness of life as a factory worker culminates in hopelessness.
I would like to know what were the actual conditions that set these people off-and how it can be solved; not as a marketing gimmick or psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo, but as a real world situation that confronts workers,everyday, working under the alienation of global hyper
capitalism.
I feel deep sorrow for the families of these poor souls-and hope something can be done.
I read in another article on the subject that the young workers started at 4am and worked late into the night.
Americans are all part of the problem.
Stop buying every new toy that comes out.
Why all Americans, specifically? I've been around this world and must report that all people everywhere want more than they have.
The only difference is individual and/or national luck. HUMANS are all part of the problem. It is very naive to think only one small group (5%) should get all the credit.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to single out Americans...assuming that the writer is an American.
This is what I have learned:
Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy.
On average, one American consumes as much energy as:
2 Japanese
13 Chinese
31 Indians
128 Bangladeshis
Americans eat 815 billion calories of food each day - that's roughly 200 billion more than needed - enough to feed 80 million people.
Americans throw out 200,000 tons of edible food daily.
The average American generates 52 tons of garbage by age 75.
There are more shopping malls than high schools.
The US is my backyard. I feel compelled to clean up my backyard before calling out anyone else on theirs. Just seems more ethical.
WARNING! Suicide is now a capital offense. Anyone committing suicide will be shot and the cost of the bullet remanded to the family.
Long haunt the ghost of Chairman Mao!
Great! LOL
"...fell to his death from the roof of a dormitory building at Foxconn's Longhua factory..."
Dormitory? They make them live at the factory? Is that a clue?
America is full of factory towns ... or at least they _used_ to be factory towns, until the factory was closed and the jobs were sent to ... China.
Yeah. everyone her remenbers the old song "16 Tons", don't they?
But at least the miner got an actual shotgun-shack and company-store scrip and not juut a bunk in a crowded room.
from the article:
''This new generation of workers is better-educated, has higher dreams, more thoughts and can feel greater suffering.''
this sounds benign, but is very troubling...
to compare people in this way is illogical...stating such is dishonest...
higher dreams? more thoughts? greater suffering?
meaningless couplets, but dangerously so, as they give the appearance of meaning, and inequality...exceptionalism...
to whom is this sentence directed? at the young worker?
Dubet -
Exactly my first reaction, too.
The new generation of Chinese industrial workers is undoubtedly better educated, a trait that could at least be statistically verified.
Who says this new generation, perhaps as a result of being better educated, also has higher dreams, more thoughts, and is more sensitive when it comes to psychological pain tolerance than the previous generation of workers they are replacing? What is the factual basis for asserting this generalization?
Bill from Saginaw
It harkens back to the Vietnam days, where the Gen Westmoreland and other officers used to justify their atrocities by claiming that the "oriental" doesn't feel anguish and grief the way westerners do.
Or more likely, It just looks like these professors are just putting a class-spin on the same idea. Come to think of it, in the west's industrial revolution days, factory and mine workers were considred to be unfeeling brutes by the bourgeois and robber barron scumbags too.
You could say that unfeeling brutishness has been/is being outsourced. No doubt this makes folks in the 1st World feel a lot better about standing in line for one more unrecycleable device that will let them check their Facebook page from a-n-y-w-h-e-r-e.
I'm sure glad I'm free of this crap - although I finally got a cheap pay-per-minute cell phone for emergency use and when on hang gliding outings.
My 12 year old 450mhz Dell still perfectly works fine for everything except youtube and other flash 10 videos. If I need to upgrade, I'll just find a used, faster P-IV processor and IDE motherboard at Goodwill (maybe $50) and continue to use all the old perfectly good perpherals.
Who needs fact anymore?/
I think there is some truth to the statement.
There is research that indicates that the potential for unhappiness increases with higher IQ and better education. You're awareness of things - good and bad - is greater, your dreams are bigger, your expectations relating to your own performance and achievements are higher. You tend to be more critical of yourself.
Research has shown that if you make a group of people with varying IQ and levels of education take a test and ask them to assess their own performance the 'smarties' expect to have done worse than they actually did while those with lower IQ and education are confident that they did well.
If your horizons are wider your expectations are obviously bigger because you form your expectations on the basis of 1000 things you know are out there instead of only 10 or even 100.
The definition of happiness simply changes with the levels of your knowledge: you start out with the wish to simply survive, if you manage to ensure that you'll look for more - more money or simply 'more' as in 'there must be more to life than this'.
All dreams and expectations are formed on the basis of something you know. That's why that young guy in England (I think) who was born with the inability to remember can't imagine his future and has no expectations.
I remember an example from some book. The example related to beauty ideals and how unrealistic expectations are created but I find it fitting non the less: In the older days when the biggest journey you were likely to make in your life time (and many never made this journey) was the 10km walk to the next town (which probably was a village by today's standards) your choice of 'beauties' was very limited and the most beautiful girl in the world lived in your village simply because all you knew were the girls in your village. The girl might have been missing some teeth but since she was missing less teeth than the other girls she was considered more beautiful. Or maybe she was richer than the other ones and fatter i.e. healthier looking. So a guy in a medieval village was dreaming of the fattest girl in the village, while nowadays pimply teenagers want an Angelina.
The Chinese workers might have arrived at the 'there must be more to life than this' point.
I recall a company I worked for in Germany, a very progressive place with flexible working arrangements, communal 'home cooked' lunches several times a week, dogs and babies in the offices, free tea, coffee, mineral water, yogurts and fresh fruit for all, generous salaries and holiday arrangements. A few years ago they were bought by an English company who turned back the clock. Most perks disappeared. While the working environment now probably isn't worse than what's considered best practice here in Australia, many people found the new situation unacceptable - it wasn't a company they wanted to work for anymore. As a result employees left in droves.
No-one killed themselves but I guess that's what happened to the French employees somebody mentioned in a comment - they lost their 'more to (work)life' and not having previous experience with so much of the 'less to life' they were unable to cope. Also, apparently bullying was rife and we know what the effects of bullying can be.
I still love my iphone.
You represent the kind of thoughtless, heartless hedonism and class privilege that is causing untold suffering and despair to your fellow human beings, and is driving this planet off a cliff. We don't need the capitalist monster's toxic crap. And yes, I know that I am typing this on a computer and that I need to work on weaning myself away from this poison, too.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Pardon me while I go sell an old sword at the pawn shop to cover my light bill this month.
Weaning? Are you joking? YOU are class privilege. YOU stand on a pedestal of privileged sputtering that perpetuates this. To think that your boycott of toxic electronics will do anything. You live in a prison shaped by perceived freedom. Technology does not cause suffering. Corporatocracy causes suffering. Technology will save us if we move to a Resource Based Economy.
Eli, my thoughts exactly -- except for that last bit. Technology's diminishing returns scare me more than simply returning to a simpler mode of life.
We split the atom and it goes to building world-ending bombs. Advances in food production and meds explode the human population way beyond Earth's carrying capacity. Everybody gets a cell phone and, for all we know, this is disrupting our DNA or wiping out all the bees. Etc, etc, etc. I have zero faith in technology saving life on Earth -- the contrary, my lifetime has only seen technology all but set us to the point of no return.
Making a moral judgement about believing one faith (technology) or another (boycotting) is just silly.
I feel that technology has had these implications due to profit. Profit is created by scarcity which in turn creates poor technology. If all the tech that we live with was encouraged rather than suppressed for the creation of profit, than the negative results you express would be greatly diminished.
I agree that for-profit anything tends to bring out the worst, and that profit poisons everything. But profit is not the central issue in the examples I give above (secret weapons developed to end horrible world-wide wars, food and meds advancements designed to feed and make healthy starving regions, communications advancements that allow us all access to the wider world).
These (excepting the bomb, for the most part) are quite humanitarian in nature. The problem comes when more and more human beings get their hands on these products. We're 99% chimpanzee, after all, and behave as such. Profits are a bit of a straw man here, no? Isn't the real problem something in us?
...and, I might add, the solution's there too: in us, not in our contraptions.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Absolute half-baked gibberish, eli_bunyan.
Love your i-phone huh. So you are telling us that you fully support a communist/capitalist country which pays low wages and uses forced labor so the heads of Apple can be multi-millionaires and so you can have an overpriced i-phone. Thats what your telling us huh? Sounds like the typical fucking American.
Just like the clowns that keep running back to Wal-Farts. It doesn't matter how many of their pets kick off due to contaminated pet food, Made In China, or contaminated human food, Grown in China, and all of those poor upper middleclass folks who had to move out of their brand new mini-mansions because of contaminated drywall, Made in China, and now for the fourth time in five years Wal-Farts is selling childrens jewelry with large amounts of Cadmium (as in Heavy Metals)in them. (Also Made In China)
It doesn't matter how many times Big Business in America kills Americans, the American people keep running back for their cheap plastic shit!
I still love my iphone.
Z1,
Well said.
Chelsea
I wonder if his new liver came from China too? :)
>^^<
Use your iphone to study the mining of Coltan (the industrial name for columbite–tantalite) in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
''You cannot compare the situation with the national average suicide rate...You can only compare this with the situation in other similar factories.''
How Orwellian yet somehow American-like in their corporatist PR the Chinese capitalist totalitarians are becoming.
"...workers have been told to sign letters promising not to kill themselves and even agreeing to be sent to psychiatric institutions if they appear to be in an 'abnormal mental or physical state for the protection of myself and others'"
So if they kill themselves, then what, the Chicom government or the American factory leaser or the manufacturing sub-contractor strips any benefits from the surviving families? Oh, that's right--it's CHINA: There are no benefits and they work them 16 to 18 hours a day seven days a week.
It appears that in China as in the U.S. all our best minds are from centuries past.
It's all in the name of American greed and the almighty f#%*^@g dollar.
Apple loves Chinese-style totalitarian capitalism, the latest version of slavery.
Steve Jobs stuffs his pockets with money made on the backs of suicidal workers making his gadgets.
I guess Dell and HP are in the same boat. They're all merry capitalist using the services of Foxconn. And how about Carlie Fiorina, former head of HP and now in the political arena. Where does that place her? She was serviced by commies, or capitalist commies when it was convenient to be such, so where does that put her in her bid for governorship of CA.
The World is not so simple as you would like it to be. Bill and Malinda are saints in their concern for the health of the world and the Koch brothers are the spawn of Satan, but they are all out to make a buck and at the pinnacle of the capitalist world. Should we burn them all in the same fire when and if the revolution comes, and mark my words - either it or the abyss of Despond will indeed soon be upon us.
Oh yes. I also love my iPhone. How 'bout you. Do you love your Lexus. Or your Ford Explorer. I'm really tired of this "holier than thou", smug Yankee horseshit.
Why smug "Yankee" horseshit?
Indeed! What is special about the horseshit of smug Yankees? And, just to be clear, is this "yankees" meant to include all Americans, as when Aussies or Brits use the term, or is this specific to U.S. citizens north of the Mason-Dixon line? I really must know, or my smug replies must be held in check!
Are you replying to yourself?
Well, in many ways you are right.
But just to let you know I am an unemployed worker who is homeless and in 36 years of working, never made more than $15,000 a year. No Lexus, Ford Explorer, iPhone, or any of that for me.
So there are indeed some smug people, but there are also a lot of just plain poor working people in the US as well.
Capitalism hurts everybody, so anyone who thinks they are "OK" because of their level of material comfort is sadly mistaken. A good example is how the American "middle class" (credit card class) is now feeling the pinch.
None of us are OK under capitalism, no matter how many material goods we collect, so maybe w should stop collecting them. That would help workers everywhere.
If Bill Gates is a saint then I'm the fucking Pope!
LOL
Well richsmith2, you got a guffaw out of me.
The brothers are the poster childs for the 95% inheritance tax. I spent my first ten years working for Texaco Oil. I know all about organized crime. The Mafia are pikers but at least run honest business. They are killers and thieves and don't disquise it with Kodak moments.
Bill cheated the creator of DOS and never looked back as he bought everyone in his way. Apple has always had the superior product and now is second to Apple in worth.
The questions you ask are profound. I remember young Carlie as she was sleeping her up and I guess that is as valid as inheriting.
The Koch Brothers are the Marx Brothers of the financially over-endowed. I gave up on their law suites years ago; yet, they still can get my attention.
I just love the CATO Institute when the wind blows my way so Koch ain't all bad. Their marriage to the Atlas Society is interesting too for a libritarian concoction.
Thanks for the laugh. I actually thought about John Birch today...
So you are boycotting Chinese products so as not to be the cause of this horror?
Without us consumers, they, the Chinese peasants, would be back at their homes and growing crops and raising chickens as they have done for 5000 years.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I and other members of my family, we make a concerted effort not to buy Chinese stuff.