Foxconn suicide plant stops hiring new workers

There is something none of the posters here realizes and in fact none of the investigators of these suicides have found it either.

The Foxconn city-factory put workers on the assembly lines too close together. Why is that important?

Forty years ago workers using the first prototypes of modern close spaced office workstations began to have mental breaks. It was traced to the vision startle reflex. The cubicle was designed to deal with it by 1968.

A paper on the Internet has pictures that show Foxconn uses cubicles in offices. They failed to recognize the same problem when it appeared on their assembly lines.

They won't find this phenomenon. It is silent, painless, and invisible. Workers having exposure cannot detect it.

Across the Pacific 14 elementary schools in Ontario Canada have students with complaints of headaches, dizziness, trouble sleeping, and memory loss. Pictures used to illustrate computer use in these schools show students crowded together, using laptops, sitting in each other's peripheral vision, without Cubicle Level Protection That's Subliminal Distraction. Parents are blaming WiFi EMR and demanding the school board turn off the WiFi transmitters. That won't help.

The episode it causes usually happens to one person in an incorrectly designed office. Two outbreaks at the same time is rare.

Nothing tried so far has worked to stop the Foxcon suicides. Raising pay, changing hours, or getting no suicide pledges. They won't stop until the design problem is fixed.

With democracy the degree of your disappointment is directly related to the depths of your credulity.

Democracy is nothing like a revolution, it's just a pretty name for a long con.

The whole dormitory+factory deal sounds like an Orwellian nightmare, reminds me of a boarding school I was forced to attend.

Ironic that Chinese employers are becoming the capitalist oppressors that Marxist revolution was dedicated to preventing.

It highlights the ultimate hypocrisy of the human condition and the universality of authoritarian heirarchy in human society which makes revolution a perpetual necessity even in the democratic countries. But theirs is a bloodless and ritualised revolution. Power changes hands but all are forgiven in the new order. If you cut one head off by violence another will grow bearing the scars of decapitation. Its inevitable that a post revolutionary culture will become a democratic culture in time.

China is beginning to resemble Britain during the industrial revolution, the satanic mills etc. But that's what you would expect, since the British revolution was three hundred years earlier than the cultural revolution.

I hope these struggles wherein factory bosses are being faced with the need to treat human beings with humanity is the start of something better for China. I hope it is the point at which rationalism overcomes the struggle for power and prepares the way for mutual recognition and eventually the ritual of democracy, which is revolution without the blood and a recognition of our shared humanity across the divide of political opposition.

There has been a bit of a rash of intruder massacres at nursery schools in China and it seems that knives of one sort or another are used. Or maybe it's just more fun that way.

According to Google there are several videors of these events online, although it may be videos about these events, and "Watch Massacre at China nursery via MSN UK Online" for instance being misleading.

If it was about harsh conditions, "being shouted at by the boss" or anything like that, you'd take a big fucking gun to work and blow the arseholes away before doing yourself in, right?

Maybe there are chemicals involved, something causing depression, maybe even a virus.

Deserves epidemiological analysis.

70%? Nearly twice a small number is still a small number.

You want names? Easy: almost every hightech company you can think of. They're all customers of Foxconn.
The headline was "Foxconn workers commit suicide", then some Apple-hating schmug added "because of lost iPhone".

Most of the world are seeing that the USA to keep their lifestyle don't give a Sh** what happen in other part of the world. They see only numbers an statistics, it is so sad, but thanks to that lifestyle that is unsustainable in time they are paying a big price with the economy crisis from which they will somehow recover but USA will not be the economy potency that were before the crisis.

What kind of life is working in a manufacturing plant nonstop so much you sleep at your workstation. That isn't a life int he first place, so it's not amazing they ended it.

If we really wanted to figure out if these suicides are statistically significant we would have to first ask, are suicides significant? if they are then they are statistically significant.

So if a person commits suicide, it is significant, you number pushing monkeys.

The second question is, is a person more likely to commit suicide under those working conditions?

It's one step short of slave labour.

If working conditions are a significant factor in causing people to *choose* to commit suicide then obviously there is some legal responsibility that foxconn has towards the health of its workers.

Sure, a 70% pay rise might make some people less stressed, maybe. But if they work 6 days a week from 7am to 11pm then when are they going to enjoy the extra money to de-stress??

(Those numbers are not a guess)

Remind us again, how many of the Foxconn execs have their adult children working under the same conditions?

Exploitive hypocrites, getting rich at the expense of other peoples lives. Remember that the next time you buy apple.

(there are other companies too, maybe La Inq should research some...)

From what I've read from Chinese tabloids, basically that chairman is sick in the head. The workers are supposed to be "trained" and "hardened" like the spartans of the movie 300. One dude wasn't even suicide but over exhaustion because he worked long hours, didn't sleep well and got called in the middle of the night to run errands. I guess he wasn't much of a spartan.

Also, if the worker screws up, they make them stand in like a circle and get yelled at by the boss publicly. Not to mention the huge pay cut from what is already minimum wage, the absolute minimum to feed yourself two meals a day.

The reason ppl are killing themselves is because 3 guys initially committed suicide due to stress. The families of those 3 apparently got paid a big sum of money to keep their mouths shut. Soon, a few others heard of this, and decided shit, I'm working this bloody hard and I'm getting pay cuts and shit.. why don't I just die and give a small fortune to my family?

Well, that was my understanding of it.. and it was much entertaining to read than.. oh .. 11 guys committed suicide.. small percentage.. meh.

Now, for Foxconn, consider 13 suicides in about 6 months in a facility that has around 400,000 people.
That's equivalent to 6.5 suicides per 100,000 people per annum.

According to Wikipedia, suicide rate in the USA in 2005 was 11.1 suicides per 100,000 people per annum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

Am I missing something here, or is the suicide rate at Foxconn actually only about half as bad as the USA?

How usual is it to kill yourself in the workplace?

In China, maybe very.

What is the expected suicide rate for a "city" of 420,000 people?