Thinking of buying an iPad- number of suicides reaches 10?
The spate of suicides at the factory making iPhones and iPads moved closer towards epidemic levels yesterday as a 23 year old man became the tenth worker to leap to his death at the same Foxconn plant.
Psychologists and experts in suicide have begun to talk openly of “mass hysteria” among the 350,000 mostly migrant workers at the vast factory in Shenzhen, which makes digital equipment such as iPods, mobile phones and laptop PCs.
The fatalities come amid mounting condemnation of working conditions at the Taiwanese-owned plant in southern China and the decision of several of the company’s biggest clients — Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard — to investigate how their products are being manufactured.
The latest victim, like the nine other young employees who have committed suicide at the plant since January, leapt from the seventh floor of his dormitory.
The company has made hastily contrived efforts to improve conditions for its workers, the majority of whom stand in the same position for 12-hour shifts and receive the equivalent of about £90 each month in salary. Those measures include the use of “soothing” music on the factory floor, the recruitment of hundreds of dance instructors and the establishment of a suicide hotline.
The plant’s astonishing productivity levels have attracted global clients such as Samsung, IBM and Sony, but labour activists have long alleged that the famous efficiency comes at too high a cost.
The attention given to Foxconn suicides relates less to the actual numbers and more to the apparent pace at which they have risen and that the victims have taken their lives in the same “copycat” way. If the suicide rate at the Foxconn factory matched the Chinese national average (which they do not because most Chinese suicides happen in the country), the sheer size of the 300,000 workforce there would imply around 45 deaths per year.
The steep rate of increase in Foxconn suicides over recent weeks, though, has challenged the business model on which China’s manufacturing industry has grown. The company’s plant in Shenzhen is a city-sized complex set up with the sole purpose of feeding the global appetite for cheap technology.
Speculation that big brands might take their business away from Foxconn to protect their image are unrealistic, said one Tokyo-based electronics analyst. He said that consumers were no longer prepared to pay the sort of money it would cost to build computers, digital cameras and iPods without the productivity of companies such as Foxconn.
