Looks like another one's gone :
What has triggered the suicide cluster at Foxconn?daily telegraphBy Malcolm Moore : May 16th, 2010
There was another death at Foxconn yesterday. A 21-year-old man with “several” knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn’s dormitories in Shenzhen.Foxconn is the Taiwanese company, also known as Honhai, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone and iPod, as well as goods for just about every major technology company, including Sony, Nintendo, HP and so on.
However, the company has been plagued by a series of suicides at its plants, particularly at the enormous Longhua plant where over 400,000 people work.
Just last Tuesday, a 24-year-old female employee died after jumping from an apartment building near the Longhua plant. She was the eighth suicide leap since the beginning of the year. Yesterday may or may not have been a suicide jump, since a dagger was found at the scene.
For those who believe the spate of suicides is statistically in line, given how many people work at Foxconn, consider this: the company says it has prevented a further 30 people from trying to kill themselves in the past three weeks alone. Clearly, something out of the ordinary is going on.
What is happening in Shenzhen has the hallmarks of a “suicide cluster”, when the notion of suicide spreads rapidly through a group of people, often teenagers or young adults. Foxconn says it is at its wits’ end as to how to tackle the problem, and has even drafted in a Buddhist monk to try to purge its factories of evil spirits.
Others have said the current generation of migrant workers, who have opted to move from other parts of China to seek their fortunes in the country’s coastal factories, are not as tough as their forbears.
Usually better educated than their parents, they are prone to existential angst when confronted with seven-day weeks and 15-hour days of repetitive manufacturing. The nine Foxconn workers involved in suicide leaps this year were all aged under 25 and had worked for the company for less than six months.
Moreover, the Southern Weekend newspaper, which recently sent an intern to work in a Foxconn factory for a month, points out that the workers are making “top-notch” products, but that their monthly wage is “so low they cannot even afford to buy an iPhone”.
(Chinese students are still required to study Marx, so it is perhaps worth pointing out, as an aside, that Marx identified four types of alienation that arose from the capitalist system, including workers feeling inhuman because they were cogs in a machine, because the work they do is reduced to a commercial commodity that is traded on a market, because they have little to do with the design and production of the product, and because their work is repetitive, trivial and meaningless, offering little if any intrinsic satisfaction.)
Liu Zhiyi, the Southern Weekend intern who went undercover, came up with an interesting analysis of the problems in the Foxconn factory. First, he pointed out that while the workers are desperate to improve their situation in life, they rarely know how to.
“One worker impressed me a great deal,” he wrote. “His name was Wang Kezhu and he often climbed to the highest places to check the storage, or ran the fastest to get the new cargo. He would yell or shout or sing to release the pressure building up in him. He told me that people got promoted if they had skills, and that he was hoping to learn useful skills. He once applied for a job at an education institute, but when they called he could not understand what they were saying. The workers feel their salary is too low. They want to change their life through working hard, but they do not know how to go about making the changes.”
Liu also wrote about the lack of connections in such a giant factory, with its transient population of workers. “There are hundreds of thousands of workers but they find they come to resemble each other. Dorm mates on different shifts barely get a chance to talk to each other, and even if you have slept in a dorm a few months you might not know the name of your room mates,” described Liu.
“If society is like a net, you can hardly become suicidal if you are in the position of a knot with many layers of connections. But if you have no links, other than on the production line, then you become one single and unconnected knot. Then you get suicidal facing a machine all day and with no way of releasing your anxiety like normal people.”
