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After Terry Guo's apology, another suicide at FoxconnPosted by Joel Martinsen on Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 12:33 PM
Foxconn chairman Terry Guo (郭台铭) led a media tour of the company's plant in Shenzhen yesterday. Many of today's mainland newspapers printed photos of Guo bowing to express his regret over the nine deaths and two attempted suicides of company workers. The chairman's condolences were not as effective in newspapers that received a brief Xinhua dispatch about the most recent death before press time. Although the Oriental Morning Post reported Guo's claim that the suicides were unrelated to factory management, it printed a photo of Guo in which he looks like he's been caught red-handed, above an even larger headline reporting on the "twelfth jump." The paper's main headline is unrelated: there are reports that some visitors to the Shanghai Expo are skipping the massive lines by faking the need for wheelchair access. Update (13:46): Hong Kong media are now reporting, based on reports from Taiwan, unconfirmed rumors of a thirteenth jump at Foxconn: Update 2: Links and Sources
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Comments on After Terry Guo's apology, another suicide at Foxconn
I may be wrong about this, but Foxconn employed 500,000 people in 2009 according to wiki; the annual suicide rate in China in 1999 was about 28 per 100,000 according to the WHO.
These statistics put the suicide rate among Foxconn employees way below national average.
Is there something I'm missing here?
Employees at Foxconn aren't representative of the demographics of China as a whole. China Divide notes:
Yep statistics can be problematic...
The age explanation doesn't cut it though. 12 suicides out of 500,000 is a rate of 1.4 per 100,000. According to those graphs, only the 5-14 year old age group has a lower rate at 0.8. The 14-24 group is 6.9 and the 25-34 group 15.1; presumably these are the age groups of the majority of Foxconn employees.
Yep, statistics are statistics, there are demographics differences to take into account, and it seems the national suicide rate has been decreasing since the WHO info was gathered. But surely one would expect a greater divergence given the amount of media coverage this story is getting?
Regardless, lots of people have been killing themselves at Foxconn and in a short period of time. Foxconn managers themselves have said that they normally have two people kill themselves per year. Now, it's almost 13. It is therefore a serious development, national statistics or no.
Sure, there are plenty of "boy-girl" problems in factories, as Guo has said. But the bottom line must be the level of stress that an inhumane factory regime has put on workers.
This is only gonna get worse as more and more weak minded, non socially adept, online raised, coddled and undereducated kids hit the workforce.
The bottom line must be an economic model built on mass migration and cheap mass production, underpinned by the festering hukou system and a lack of human rights. Foxconn is one of many companies which have been operating inhumane regimes for years.