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As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week's Consumer Electronic's Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It's not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven't lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra...
The suicide rate at foxconn seems to be lower then the general suicide rate in China.
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lessismore · 4700 days ago · link ·
That is exactly my point. These "feature" articles are often very irresponsible as gq pointed out in another thread. Another thing of note, when asked about working conditions and wages, a lot of the workers will tend to paint it to be worse than it really is thinking that external pressure will force the owners to raise their wages. I am not saying that working conditions are 100% ideal in every factory, but the western media does tend to have a biased viewed.
lessismore · 4701 days ago · link ·
I have to take these report with a grain of salt. These reports draw conclusions that all the suicides are because of working conditions and rule out everything else. Last year, a friend of mine who owns a clothing factory in Guangdong had an employee who committed suicide by jumping out of his dormitory in the middle of the night. The reason was because his girlfriend broke up with him. For many of these workers, it is the first time they are away from their families and when stressful situations arise, they don't know how to cope and for some they take extreme actions.
Considering how many people Foxconn employs (400,000), the reported 16 suicide in 2011, as tragic as it is, is not that high. For example, in Provo, UT. with a population of about 520,000 (random city I picked), the average yearly suicide toll is 302.
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lessismore · 4701 days ago · link ·
That makes me not want to visit Provo. Not that I ever thought about visiting before.