Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges. The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees. A useful way to paraphrase this is:
Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year? Not how many google employees commit suicide overall.
When phrased this way, it becomes clear that other companies have much lower suicide rates than Foxconn.
That's what is critical to compare. It turns out Foxconn's suicide rate is massively higher than equivalent Chinese employers and the inference is the alleged egregious mistreatment of Foxconn laborers by Foxconn is the cause.
A very large proportion of Chinese factory workers (including a majority of Foxconn workers) live in company-owned dormitories located on or near the factory site. Most Chinese factory workers are internal migrants from poorer northern and central provinces. These workers generally prefer dormitory accommodation, because it allows them to save a larger proportion of their salary towards their future plans.
You would only be comparing like-with-like if Google provided on-site housing at the Googleplex to a majority of their workers.
Google employees don't live at the Googleplex so that's not valid.
If you want to compare them to other companies you would either need to include suicide off campus of the other companies or exclude suicide off-shift at Foxconn.
Note that one of the attempts catalogued on Wikipedia states that one Mr. 刘 "threw himself from the sixth floor of a dormitory building". That would tend to imply that the statistics cover the workers while they're on or off the job -- the statistics are for suicide attempts on campus, but the employees live on campus.
And that would tend to imply that the appropriate comparison is indeed "how many people commit suicide anywhere?", not "how many people commit suicide in the office?".
If you have a bunch of companies trying to keep their shit together while barely able to make their product and then someone kills himself simple because the situation is no longer worth living - then it is a sad thing.
If the product is one of the most successful things in human history the suicide is a design goal.
If we don't stand up to it and at least voice our objection we will all be treated like that eventually - regardless of corporate success or personal productivity.
The only other role is that of the psychopath pressuring those who do the work in order to meet the suicide quota. If you don't meet the suicide quota your workers are not working hard enough or you are paying them to much. It's simple business logic nothing personal.
It applies to low wages for illegal immigrants too. Once they're in our country, we feel responsible for them. Before they got here, we don't care at all how little they earn. Some people even go so far as to want to kick them out to save them from earning low wages. Really it just saves us the guilt but makes it worse for the individual.
And if someone lives on corporate campus but commits suicide off of a bridge in town, not counted?
When people discuss anything, all parties should strive for intellectual honesty. As the grandparent post used a false example, then it helps all sides involved to correct that and prevent it from happening again.
Not at all. The repudiation of slavery built everything we love. The Confederacy went to war with the Union to protect its failing economy. Their loss in the Civil War resulted in the utter destruction of the slave economy and what it produced.
The slave plantations could barely sustain themselves, and they started to war because they wanted to protect their fragile economy from competition.
The free north industrialized and economically buried the slave south. The rebel army didn't even have shoes - they went barefoot. The slave economy couldn't even produce shoes.
Of course there was trade and investment going back and forth between the states, after all, it was one country. But the idea that the wealth of the north depended on "enormous profits" from slavery is just not credible.
There's a reason that slavery died out in the northern states by 1800 or so. It didn't pay. It didn't produce enormous profits. It was an economic loser.
Slavery has failed every time it went up against free labor. It just can't compete.
Doing it by choice creates all sorts of ill psychological effects. It means I have to convince myself to keep doing it, and as a result I'll try to convince myself of things like "it's fair" or "I like this" or so on. I think I might actually be happier as a slave than a wage slave doing the exact same shitty work and ridiculous hours as a slave because at least I can be honest with myself about the situation.
Normally wage slavery is better - because it means that the employers can't enforce quite as shitty conditions or long hours as a actual slave. But it's not clear to me that that is happening here, and even if it is happening here if you understood your argument to rely on it.
And to be clear, we are well beyond "asshole boss" or anything legal in the western world. We are considering a situation where you are treated identically to a slave except that instead of being forced to work via beatings and supplied food, you are supplied just enough money to eat - buying everything at the company store - and forced to work by "well otherwise you starve to death".
(By food I also include things like shelter and so on...)
There are people in the world who are functionally chattel slaves who happen to receive a nominal wage, but this is not what the term “wage slavery” typically refers to; that term (and perhaps your argument, though I am not sure) equivocates wage labor with chattel slavery. I and others believe the difference is vast, important, and moral.
That's why such work is a good thing, not a bad thing. It saves people from starving to death. Which is what happens periodically during famines in extremely undeveloped countries, such as most of history.
That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those.
> Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.
Who exactly? That does not sound representative.
The skilled workers did the difficult parts. Getting the materials to the construction site and other (often dangerous) tasks were done either by children or peasants that had either been forced or attracted by false promises. In addition the churches and kings often didn't pay the promised money. Just read some history books. The top guys always wanted to keep as much to themselves as they could. No difference to now. They could be even greedier back then because the little guy had no rights.
Just a few examples of great things accomplished without great human suffering or slavery- space race, Internet, Inca Trail, Bilbao Museum.
This was literally the result of the Cold War.
> Internet
Partially the same as above, also, there's no denying that they're isn't any suffering because of the Internet.
> Inca Trail, Biblao Museum
These mostly came about because of mechanization or better technology…
Explain how slavery built the Internet or triggered the space race.
A tremendous amount of things in the past were created by skilled artisans, workers, farmers etc.
And in those cases where people had to do difficult work and suffered, that was because there were no other ways of accomplishing that work.
It's not that there was some cabal of evil leaders making life hard for the masses, it's that in order to accomplish things like mining and large scale public works without machines, hard manual labor was necessary.
Of course we could have just not done any of this, but then we would still be hunter gatherers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor
"More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon"
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#NASA_career
"American authorities then chose to use von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle. Wernher von Braun had such an idea originally proposed in 1954, but it was denied at the time.[60]"
Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you can do when you don't give a fuck about a certain group of people. You can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to eachother, or you can leverage the endless suffering of someone really far away so you can leave a mean comment on someone's youtube video while you take a shit."