This is probably the thirtieth time I've seen this debunking over the last several years. The first was not long after the original Foxconn suicides news cycle. This is widely available enough information that if somebody references the Foxconn suicides and doesn't know the figures you mention by now, they have no interest in understanding the reality of the situation.

I say this as someone who's considerably more negative about Apple than the median here. I just think you're wasting your breath assuming intellectual honesty from people repeating a canard years after it's been debunked (Note that I'm excluding people aware of the statistic who are interpreting Foxconn's suicides as still notable for whatever reason)

This is the first time I've seen this debunking. And my head isn't in the sand, and I am definitely interested in understanding the reality of the situation.

So, it's not a waste of breath at all.

Thanks for the counterexample. I'm sincerely curious as to how you ended up in this position. When you read a claim (in this case, "Foxconn workers have an elevated suicide rate"), are you not in the habit of at least Googling it to verify whether the source you read is mistaken or lying? In this case, the very first Google result is a short Wikipedia article containing the debunking, for a grand total of thirty seconds of research required to get a clear picture of the truth of the matter.

This isn't a rhetorical question,as I'm actually curious: taking you at face value as subjectively not having your "head in the sand", I don't have a model for how you'd end up believing the Foxconn suicide claim without being aware of the counterargument.

To be fair, you should compare to a demographic group similar to Foxconn workers. Comparison to the whole population may not be very informative due to confounders.

That rate seemed high, but apparently the UK rate is 10 per 100,000 - same O().

15 per, for men.

The first time I heard about Foxconn was in a French newspaper, Libération, on the day we learned about Jobs' death. Steve Jobs was on pages 2-3, Foxconn on pages 4-5. I don't know if it was a crazy coincidence or they were just keeping the Foxconn story on hand to publish the next time they had anything else to say about Apple.

The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions.

Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons.

Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.

Is there any reason to believe, Foxconn employees don't have any other personal/environmental problem causing them to suicide.

While I am all for improving conditions of employees, it should be in context to the environment. If the whole country is working on 1$/day, expecting few companies to got 5$ just because they have global visibility is not feasible. It is not good for the company, economy and social dynamics of that region.

>Is there any reason to believe, Foxconn employees don't have any other personal/environmental problem causing them to suicide.

It seems #1 reason for sucide is mental illness or chronic pain/disease severely impacting their quality of life.

You need to ask can mentally ill people get employed at foxconn? They would be having interviews like for every other job, and probably the workers are selected based on their efficiency which can exclude a lot of mentally ill people.

If not, then we've to remove the number of people who commit suicide due to chronic health issue or mental illness then compare the data again.

Not my area of expertise, but someone with depression or similar disease should be able to interview and function well in company for most of days. Particularly someone very smart may have problem with communication intensive roles, but may excel in repetitive/manual tasks.

Really, do you have a source for that? Because that seems like an outrageous claim to just make up.

How are we to judge it without numbers? While everyone likely could be better in thid spacd focusing efforts disproportionately on the ones better than average already seems irrational, arbitrary, and potentially counterproductive as it turns into "Improving anything in response to complaints is a mistake - giving in only leads to more trouble over doing nothing and waiting for them to go away."

Disturbingly the later anti-pattern has held shockingly true with ethical standards and as infamous actors go on with bad practices for decades while those who improve are subjected to increasingly harsh criticism and boycotts. Ethical Tall Poppyism is a disturbingly common trend.

> The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions.

That's a pretty wild assertion.

Is there a reason to believe that the folks working at Foxconn have otherwise 100% idyllic lives with no divorces, deaths of loved ones, clinical depression, etc.?

Well, this happened in France circa 2008 in a state company becoming private. The suicide rate was bit superior to the population average, but not that much.

So the CEO argument during trial was to compare the suicide rate to cop's suicide rate and say "that's not too bad". This is dumb. You should compare to the suicide rate in similar company, or if you cna't find similar company in your country, you take the suicide rate 5 years prior and adjust for intangibles. Turns out the suicide rate in telco was way inferior to the population average prior to the "new management" methods. The ex-CEO will probably avoid prison still. But the trial isn't over yet, so anything can happen.

Not to mention that there's >1 million of them. There are cities smaller than that. Every kind of deviation from the norm, they probably have one, ten or a hundred of them.

Would be interesting to know how they differentiated between different "causes".