Apple had a mega day at retail yesterday with refreshes for the MacBook Air, Mac Mini, new Cinema Display and, of course, OS X Lion – but this has been over-shadowed with the reports of yet another suicide at Foxconn in China.
The 21-year-old is reported to have jumped from the sixth floor to his death and is the latest in a long line of suicides at the factory in Shenzhen, China.
Foxconn has famously made workers sign agreements that they wouldn’t commit suicide, but this quite clearly is working and is now tarnishing Apple’s squeaky clean reputation.
Its been long reported that the conditions at the manufacturing plants have been to blame for a spate of suicides by workers. Workers are expect to work 12 hour shifts, 6 days a week and 98 hours overtime a month. Living conditions aren’t great either as workers are as expected to live in dormitories on-site – the latest suicide happened at one of these dormitories.
Foxconn has obviously been quick to point out that the latest worker to take his life had not actually worked any overtime and are trying to play down the problem. There's no doubt that this is tarnishing Apple's squeaky clean reputation and can't be good for the morale of the workers at Foxconn either.
Foxconn and Apple have tried very hard to try and solve the situation with improved pay and conditions, yet the problem continues to happen. It’s even got to the point that the management at the factory brought in Monks to expelled spirits which they beleived led to the numerous tragedies.
Workers earn on average as little as $5 a day for their hard graft. Steve Jobs has commented on the situation before and famously denied that it's manufacturing partner Foxconn is a gizmo sweatshop, "Foxconn is not a sweatshop," he said. "They've got restaurants and swimming pools"¦ For a factory, it's a pretty nice factory."
2 thoughts on “Another Foxconn Worker Jumps To His Death”
Foxconn also make “gizmos” for Nintendo, Amazon, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft (X-Box) , Nokia, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, etc.
So why is it Apple who gets the press about this company? I don’t see any of the other companies trying to improve conditions.
They have 1,000,000 employees and have an average of 17 suicides a year (all pinned to Apple). If you check those stats against the average suicide rate in China you will see that it’s actually VERY low.
Foxconn also make \"gizmos\" for Nintendo, Amazon, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft (X-Box) , Nokia, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, etc.
So why is it Apple who gets the press about this company? I don\’t see any of the other companies trying to improve conditions.
They have 1,000,000 employees and have an average of 17 suicides a year (all pinned to Apple). If you check those stats against the average suicide rate in China you will see that it\’s actually VERY low.