Is Apple Driving Workers to Suicide?

The muckraking media has been buzzing with serious tones about what clearly seems to be horrible working conditions and loads of suicides in the plants in which Apple products are produced. Apple contracts out this work to Foxconn, a Taiwan-based firm who has over 900,000 employees. Most of these employees are in China.

I bet if we inject a bunch of senseless emotion into
this we can obscure the fact that this is a made-up crisis.

Apparently, Foxconn employees are being driven to suicide by their working conditions. The company has put up suicide-prevention nets at its main factory in Shenzhen, giving the place a creepy sort of air. That particular location is gigantic, covering 1.15 square miles and being made up of 15 factories. How many people are employed there isn't clear, but it's probably well over 400,000. That's roughly the number of people who live in Miami proper.

Media reports cite monotonous work, dangerous working conditions, long hours, poor pay and a management team that just generally is not overtly friendly. Of course people are hurling themselves over buildings; look at how terrible things are compared to your job!

This is silly, and you don't need to take my word for it.

Your job is in the United States, where your expectations ("reference point") for a job are much higher. People voluntarily work at Foxconn. They would not do this if it was horrible. The tragic comedy of comfortably fat people in America enforcing their labor philosophy on skinny people in Asia just to watch that factory close and everybody go back to starving to death has been played out before. Luckily, Apple loves profits too much to behave like Kathy Lee Gifford did when it turned out her clothing line was made by the fingers of innocent children. Those kids weren't fortunate enough to have truly evil capitalists running the show.

The best part of it is that we are talking about 17 suicides among 1 million workers. Suicide rates are calculated per 100,000, meaning that Foxconn factories have suicide rates of 1.7 per 100,000. China's suicide rate is 22.23; the United States comes in at 11.8, Canada at 11.3, and France at 16.3.

Working at a Foxconn facility actually drastically cuts your risk for suicide, regardless of what you compare it to. That's because Foxconn represents a huge increase in living standards for its employees and as a result they are happy to be working there.