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Comment by Inconel | Hacker News Reader

I stand corrected then. Just to be clear, I wasn't meaning to blindly come to the defense of Foxconn, I don't know enough about them to form an educated opinion, although if I'm being honest it would not surprise me if they have some rather horrid working conditions, but I see the Foxconn suicide stats thrown around often without any context of wider suicide rates.

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I'm totally with you - I saw the Foxconn suicide rates at the time and thought both "That sounds very troubling" and then "How many employees do they have? Actually that sounds quite low, perhaps this is a bit of a storm in a teacup", and then I did a bit of googling and concluded that people throwing themselves off the roof of their workplace, probably in protest over the working conditions, ought to be considered a different sort of suicide from the ones that normally make up national suicide rates.

On the other hand, employing north of a million people to do assembly work probably comes with all sorts of challenges.

When reading suicide statistics please remember that what counts as a death by suicide can be tricky to define, and that makes comparing statistics really difficult.

This is especially the case in China where official stats are of variable quality.

In general we think China has a very high rate of death by suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_China

> Statistics are somewhat controversial in that independent studies often produce estimates that are greatly at odds with official statistics provided by the country's government. On the basis of data gathered in 1999, the government estimated an overall rate of 13.9 per 100,000 people,[4] much lower than in the total rate in other East Asian countries: Japan (18.5) and South Korea (28.9).

> The most recent government data provides statistics more inline with external estimations. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, China's suicide rate is 22.23 people out of every 100,000.[5] This rate places the country among the countries with the highest suicide per capita in the world. For 2009–2011, 44% of all suicides occurred among those aged 65 or above and 79% among rural residents.[6] However, a 2014 study conducted by the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong reported that China's suicide rate has dropped significantly, among the lowest levels [7] in the world. An average annual rate of about 9.8 people out of every 100,000 died by suicide as of 2009 to 2011, a 58% drop, largely as a result of population migration from rural areas and urbanization of middle class. Paul Yip, a co-author of the recent study and professor at the University of Hong Kong, said "no country has ever achieved such a rapid decline in suicides".[8]

If you look at photos from for example Tim Cook's visit to Foxconn you'll see that the factory is extremely clean and give the impression of having excellent working conditions.

The problem is how work is regimented: employees are not allowed to talk to each other while on a shift, and they get moved to New dorms randomly where they know no one, and may never see because they're on different shifts. It's a lack of human contact, a very different type of working condition.

Well, the factories may well be extremely clean, but PR pictures would look exactly the same no matter what the conditions.

Either that, or industrial farming is really lovely and caring: https://www.perdue.com/perdue-way/animal-care/ .

They're expected to act like robots. They'll soon be replaced by actual robots.

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