Thursday, April 24, 2014

Apple’s “Suicide Factories”

By Bretigne Shaffer
So I’m looking up more information related to a short story I’m working on and I come across this interesting fact.  It’s something you’d expect any journalist writing about the infamous “suicide factories” in China where Apple’s iPads and iPhones are made to mention, but surprisingly most do not.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent some time visiting factories in China – both foreign joint ventures and local enterprises.  I also visited villages and farms and have some sense of the context within which these factories exist and just how crappy rural life in China can be.  I’ve also seen railroads teeming with people from the provinces who take a train into a city and then just sit and wait, hoping to get a job in one of these factories. So there is a very special place in my heart for western intellectuals and activists who urge others to boycott goods produced by “sweatshop labor” and do not respect the choices of people to work in places that seem horrific to somebody who comes from a wealthy, developed country.
So here’s the fact:  The Foxconn factories in China, which manufacture products for Apple, among other companies, have gotten a lot of attention because of poor (by western standards) working conditions, and because some of the workers in the factories had committed suicide and others had threatened to do the same if their demands for better conditions were not met.  Employees in these factories were asked to sign a pledge that they would not commit suicide and some of the factories installed “suicide prevention nets” to keep people from throwing themselves out of windows.
That’s the part everyone who’s heard this story already knows.  Here’s what you probably don’t know:  Out of a total of 800,000 workers (or possibly 1.2 million, but I’m going with the smaller number to make this as conservative as possible), 18 Foxconn workers attempted suicide in 2010 and 14 were successful.  That’s 14 suicides out of (again, conservatively) 800,000, or a rate of 1.75 out of 100,000.  While getting accurate figures for anything in China is always a challenge, estimates of the nationwide suicide rate for China range from 13.9 out of every 100,000 (the Chinese government’s official rate in 1999) to 30.3 per 100,000. I’ll go with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s rate of 22.23 per 100,000.
So, again using pretty conservative figures, the suicide rate at the Foxconn factories is around 1.75 out of 100,000, while nationwide it is closer to 22 out of 100,000 – more than ten times higher.  You’d think that westerners who care about working conditions in the third world would be applauding Foxconn for providing a work environment where people are far less likely to want to kill themselves than are average Chinese people.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll be hearing much about it.

Bretigne Shaffer blogs at On the Banks.

14 comments:

  1. What about the American suicide factories, aka colleges and universities? Reporting by these institutions is not what one would call "transparent", but several studies estimate it averages roughly 7.5 per 100,000 students annually.

    Maybe the ACHA should hire Foxconn to consult on how to bring their membership's rates down to 1.75.

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    1. jesus..this is analysis? the suicide rate at our factory is below the national avg and this means? lord. adam smith wrote about this..he mentioned that factory workers become animals, lead lives not worth living..ur ignorance is breath taking

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  2. I wish the article highlighted the suicide rate of American factory workers.... Or the "Heros" in uniform.

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    1. Impossible. There are no American factory workers left, thanks to our statist friends.

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    2. Oh come on you know that's bullshit. Every time we end up pushing wages up in other countries we onshore to bust transport cost.

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  3. Facts? Logic? Numbers?

    You obviously have no idea how

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  4. If suicide bags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bag were available for any person who wanted one from a local pharmacy or from a chapter of the Hemlock society or Exit International, etc, WHAT PERCENTAGE of the population of the US might buy one and opt out of this life? I'm guessing maybe 5%.

    Of the recent banker suicides which included building jumpers, train jumpers, bridge jumpers, nail gun penetration test specimens, etc how many would have used a painless suicide bag instead had it been available? Would that have given the families a little comfort to know they died painlessly or are the families pleased the distraught evil banksters died experiencing horror, pain and agony?

    Question: Would the US be better off if people who didn't want to live had an easy way out? That would leave the more productive folks, right?

    OK, you dumbphuks with the smart-ass personal attacks can go at me now.

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    1. You can beg for a personal attack, but I'm going to actually attack your ridiculous statement.

      "I'm guessing maybe" pulling random percentages out of nowhere means absolutely nothing.

      "I'm guessing maybe" you should do a study or look at someone else's before you toss out numbers on a topic as serious as people ending their lives.

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  5. only 1/4 of the foxconn workers live in the dorms, thus it's likely the 14 number does not include those that commit suicide at home.

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  6. Where did you get the foxconn suicide numbers from?

    Did you remember to include suicides outside the factories for a fair comparison?

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    1. Euge (and Anonymous),

      The Foxconn suicide numbers were widely reported in the press a couple of years ago. Here's a Wikipedia entry listing most of them, with links to the articles where they were first reported: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#2010.

      As for suicides outside of the factories, the reporting has included coverage of suicides at the factories, at the dormitories, and at locations outside the factories (such as this one: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/us-foxconn-idUSBRE85D0S120120614).

      Is it possible that some suicides by Foxconn employees have been missed by the press, and by the advocacy groups monitoring these factories? Sure. But given the media attention that was devoted to this story, as well as the intense scrutiny of groups like SACOM, I would be very surprised if there had been a rash of even more suicides by Foxconn employees that we had not heard about. I would be absolutely stunned if the numbers of those additional unreported suicides came anywhere close to the 177 that would be needed to bring Foxconn's rate up to the (again, conservatively stated) national average.

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  7. Suicides committed AT WORK in the SAME FACTORIES are in a completely different ballpark to suicides in the general population. If you don't get this you are either callous or have a severe problem with your critical thinking faculties.

    If there was a suicide epidemic at an American company and the CEO tried to brush it aside by comparing his worker suicide rate to that of the general population there would be a national outrage. It shouldn't be acceptable just because the workers are Chinese

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  8. geez, can't you do basic logic ?
    First, you have to show that the population at foxconn is = general chinese population in terms of age, health and education.
    It could be that if you compared foxconn employees to other chinese who are similar, that foxcon has (or has not) a higher suicide rate.

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