The suicide cases at Foxconn

I am not putting up any charts today. Instead I am putting an entry on the suicide cases at Foxconn in China. To date there are 14 cases of suicides and it is serious enough to affect even the CEO to fly to Shen Zhen for damage control.

The culprit it seems is the strategy of the management to force the workers for over time. I believe on hiring, the workers are required to work an 8 hour shift. If this is so, Foxconn should be having a 3 shift system. Yet, from what I heard, there were only 2 12 hours shifts!

This is strange but as my understanding of the manufacturing rule goes, for 12 hours shift, the workers are required to work an alternate 3-day and 4-day shift. This means that Foxconn needs 4 batches of worker.

I believe Foxconn is trying a cost saving on the workers. By hiring only 2 batches of workers, they can get the workers to agree on a 6-day week, then by forcing them on compulsory 3 hours overtime a way, that completes the coverage of the workers requirement, plus cost saving on one batch of hiring.

The problem is such work load drain out the workers. They can work but not for long. Further to that, my understanding that the management themselves are not really workers friendly. They do not treat workers with respect, instead, they assume workers are naturally lazy and need to be whipped to work. This is a typical mentality of a slave driver.

Sure there are facilities for recreation and unwinding, the problem is that no time is given to the workers to use such facilities.

The saest part of it all is that the top managment sees a pay rise as the solution to the suicides. I was discussing with my colleague and both of us acknowldge that money was not the problem, in fact the take home pay is around RMB2,300, quite a good earning for the workers. The president himself still have no idea that it is their system that is the problem, suicide is only the symptom.

The workers lack the self worth, their life were like being sold to the company and no longer belong to them. Their freedom is taken away by the contract that they needed to sign every month which forces them to perform the grooling long hours work. That foxconn is having is a sweat shop.

It seems like the very few who jump found a way out for themselves. If even their lives cannot be controlled, at least they can still control their death.

What Foxconn workers need is not a pay rise, it is a total overhaul of their ways of operation.

As my understanding goes. Foxconn is not alone in the sweat shop condition. It is merely one of the many Multi-National Companies (MNC) EMS which operates this way in China. My friend told me that Flextronics is worse, and I wonder about Solectron which also relocated itself in China.