Cluster Suicides at Apple Plant Manufacturing iPods and iPhones

There was another death at Foxconn yesterday. A 21-year-old man with “several” knife cuts fell out of the seventh-floor window of one of Foxconn’s dormitories in Shenzhen in southern China.

Foxconn is the Taiwanese company, also known as Honhai, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone and iPod, as well as goods for just about every major technology company, including Sony, Nintendo, HP and so on.

However, the company has been plagued by a series of suicides at its plants, particularly at the enormous Longhua plant where over 400,000 people work.

So reports Malcolm Moore of London’s Telegraph.

Southern Weekend newspaper, which recently sent an intern to work in a Foxconn factory for a month, points out that the workers are making “top-notch” products, but that their monthly wage is “so low they cannot even afford to buy an iPhone”.

(Chinese students are still required to study Marx, so it is perhaps worth pointing out, as an aside, that Marx identified four types of alienation that arose from the capitalist system, including workers feeling inhuman because they were cogs in a machine, because the work they do is reduced to a commercial commodity that is traded on a market, because they have little to do with the design and production of the product, and because their work is repetitive, trivial and meaningless, offering little if any intrinsic satisfaction.)

Shenzhen is a city of sub-provincial administrative status in southern China’s Guangdong province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. Owing to China’s economic liberalization under the policies of reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, the area became China’s first—and arguably one of the most successful—Special Economic Zones.

APPLE INSIDER

Happy

0 0 %

Sad

0 0 %

Excited

0 0 %

Sleepy

0 0 %

Angry

0 0 %

Surprise

0 0 %