Robots Don't Complain or Demand Higher Wages or Kill Themselves...

Re:Robots Don't Complain or Demand Higher Wages or Kill Them... by natfriedman on Monday August 08, 2011 @01:04AM (#2858866)

At Foxconn in the last five years there have been 17 reported suicides out of ~1 million workers. The US rate in 2007 was, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 11.5 suicides per 100,000 people, or ~35x higher than the Foxconn rate.

Foxconners are not unusually predisposed to kill themselves. It's a jingoistic myth.

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Re:Robots Don't Complain or Demand Higher Wages or Kill Them... by Groxx on Monday August 08, 2011 @01:22AM (#2858903)

How many of those 11.5/100k have been done at work, though? The 17 and this quote seem to imply those are just the ones happening at the buildings themselves:

>To pacify its increasingly restive workers, Foxconn has repeatedly bumped up their wages, improved facilities, provided counselling and swathed its factories with nets to catch anyone leaping from a window.

And, for comparison, the WHO gives numbers that are closer to each other, though still surprising individually: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicider...

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Re:Robots Don't Complain or Demand Higher Wages or Kill Them... by free on Monday August 08, 2011 @05:02AM (#2859328)

IIRC, foxconn provides on campus housing for the workers, so everything happens at the plant

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Re:Robots Don't Complain or Demand Higher Wages or Kill Them... by Groxx on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @04:40PM (#2865513)

That rings a bell, thanks! I do wonder why the (relatively) extreme measures exist if there isn't a problem, though. Straight PR could explain, but I find it a bit unlikely.

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