Foxconn City

*UPDATES* The latest suicide happened on May 26, 2011, the 15th jump, 13th death.

After 13 of its employees committed suicide this year, most by leaping from company dormitories, Foxconn, the secretive yet world-dominant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer who makes Apple's iPhone and iPad, Sony PlayStation, Nitendo Wii, Dell computers, was under unfamiliar scrutiny.

Anonymous labor-abuse stories -- harsh working conditions and hours, subdued human interactions,...
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*UPDATES* The latest suicide happened on May 26, 2011, the 15th jump, 13th death.

After 13 of its employees committed suicide this year, most by leaping from company dormitories, Foxconn, the secretive yet world-dominant Taiwanese electronics manufacturer who makes Apple's iPhone and iPad, Sony PlayStation, Nitendo Wii, Dell computers, was under unfamiliar scrutiny.

Anonymous labor-abuse stories -- harsh working conditions and hours, subdued human interactions, constant monitoring, cold and rude management culture -- readily emerged from Foxconn's biggest manufacturing plant Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen, China. The 3 square kilometers factory complex, dubbed Foxconn City, houses more than 300,000 migrant workers and operates like a small town with an array of restaurants, stores, banks, a fire station, a hospital, an auditorium, and Olympic-size swimming pools.

Since the suicides, Foxconn's founder and chairman Terry Gou has been living on the Longhua complex, dealing with the aftermath: workers' wages increase by 30 percent to 1,200 renminbi per month followed by a second raise; some 3 million square meters of netting has been installed around most company buildings to catch jumpers; a care center staffed with on-site and hot-line counselors now runs day and night.

Experts suggested however that Foxconn's core problem is its sheer scale: a 920,000 plus workforce across more than 20 mainland factories is merely adequate to produce the world's most popular electronics, but makes an excessive cluster prone to copycat suicides. Perhaps the deaths at Foxconn are alarms not to a single firm but our unprecedented hunger for high-tech gadgets today -- its real human cost.
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