'Mass Suicide' Protest At China Foxconn Factory

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Date: Thursday January 12, 2012 08:44:43 am
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    ‘Mass Suicide’ Protest At China Foxconn Factory

    Workers at a Foxconn Technology Group campus in China staged a protest last week, threatening to jump off a building if the company did not meet their compensation demands, according to local Chinese news reports.
    Foxconn, a manufacturer of electronics for companies including Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, confirmed on Wednesday in a statement that the protest had taken place. About 150 employees at the company’s Wuhan campus staged the incident on January 4, it said.

    Pictures of the protest have been circulated by Chinese media and on social networking sites, showing a large crowd of workers gathered on top of the roof of a building, with fire trucks parked below. More pictures can be found here.

    "The incident was successfully and peacefully resolved later that morning after discussions between the workers, local Foxconn officials and representatives from the local government," the company said.

    Foxconn did not state what it manufactures at its Wuhan campus.
    The dispute occurred after workers were told they would be transferred to another business unit due to a shift in production lines, according to Foxconn. 45 employees decided to voluntarily resign, while the remaining workers chose to stay with the company.

    Working conditions at Foxconn’s factories in China have been under the spotlight since 2010, when a string of suicides occurred at the factories, that involved employees jumping off buildings. During that year, there were a total of 18 suicide attempts, with 14 deaths, according to watchdog group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior

    http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/10/401821/apple-ceo-labor-workers/?mobile=nc
    Apple CEO Makes $378 Million As Its Chinese Workers Still Toil In Terrible Conditions
    Apple CEO Tim Cook will receive a $378 million pay package this year, consisting of a $900,000 base salary and $376.2 million in stock options. This is a six-fold increase over his compensation last year, and could very well make Cook 2011′s highest paid CEO.

    At the same time that the company is handing such a huge package to its chief executive, though, the workers in China who make Apple’s most well-known products continue to toil in tough conditions. Last year, a report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group found that the Chinese workers at the Taiwanese-based company FoxConn — who assemble the iPad, as well as other high tech gadgets for Apple, HP, Microsoft and others — were forced to work loads of overtime, stand on their feet 14 hours a day, and live packed together in squalid dormitories.

    So many FoxConn workers committed suicide that the company instituted a no-suicide pact for workers to sign and installed nets on factory roofs to prevent workers from jumping. In fact, reports surfaced today of a group of FoxConn workers threatening to commit suicide after the company reneged on payments it had promised them. Atlantic Wire has the details:

        300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.

        Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That’s when the mass suicide threat came in.

    Apple has said that it is addressing the plight of its Chinese workforce — particularly after an internal audit last year showed that 137 workers at a Chinese factory “had been seriously injured by a toxic chemical used in making the signature slick glass screens of the iPhone” — but so far not much seems to have changed.

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