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.
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.
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.
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.?
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.
Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons.
Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.