Steve Jobs is having a helluva press. Apple wage-slaves are committing suicide in China and two iPhone prototypes were transported into the finders-keepers industry.
The first missing iPhone disappeared from a shipment received by the late 25-year-old known as "Foxconn worker Sun Danyong". Nowhere-referred-to-as-Mr. Danyong lept to his death from his Oxfam-approved Foxconn dormitory digs on the 16th of July 2009 after meeting with a lone-nut interrogator.
Wired explains:
Foxconn has issued a statement [Google translation] apologizing for the incident. The letter admits that the chief of Foxconn’s central security division, surnamed Gu, may have used “inappropriate interrogation methods,” including possible beatings, searching Sun’s house and holding Sun in solitary confinement. Gu is on suspension and under internal investigation, according to Foxconn.
Gu allegedly did it first but that is not where it ended. One must conclude that a second lone-nut has replaced Gu given this Wiki entry:
From Jan 2010 to May 15 2010, nine Foxconn employees attempted suicide, with eight of them succeeding.
Xinhuanet figures things differently:
BEIJING, May 13 -- Taiwan-funded Foxconn Technology, a contract maker of the iPhone and other consumer electronics, insisted yesterday its treatment of workers was "world class" despite a woman, 24, becoming the sixth employee of its Chinese mainland factory to commit suicide this year.
Relief of the tragic mathematical sort is provided by analyst doctor Paul Kedrosky:
Let's do the sad math. The rate of suicide in China is, according to the WHO, 13.0 per 100,000 for men, and 14.8 per 100,000 for women (China is one of the few countries where the female suicide rate exceeds the male one). Given 300,000 employees at Foxconn's massive Shenzhen facility, we should, therefore, expect somewhere between 39 and 43 suicides a year -- tragedies, but also the interplay of known suicide rates and a large company population.
It is sad but true that annualized we would end up considerably lower than the 39 suicides figure cited above. In other words, it is entirely likely that Foxconn, however difficult its work environment, and however stressful its Apple relationship, is seeing a "suicide cluster" that is happening just by tragic chance.
Tragic chance is not an element addressed in the 1988 CDC suicide cluster recommendations. Unfortunate that - for Foxconn workers, especially "surname Zhu", the latest to leap beyond the daggers of happenstance.
Relief of the comic philosophical sort was offered by UK Telegraph Shanghai opinion blogger Malcolm Moore:
Others have said the current generation of migrant workers, who have opted to move from other parts of China to seek their fortunes in the country’s coastal factories, are not as tough as their forbears.
Carrying on, Moore seems to suggest that the Chinese government is quite stupid:
(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.)
The American government learned the easy way that alienation arising from the capitalist system must be taken advantage of as it develops. Those secrets are worth a bundle. There is nothing as lesson-effective as a shoebox full of fed notes, such as the one handed to a cog in the wheel who swooped up an iPhone at a bar. Bloomberg reports on the lost-and-found bought-and-paid-for iPhone incident which so far has left no one dead:
The first missing iPhone disappeared from a shipment received by the late 25-year-old known as "Foxconn worker Sun Danyong". Nowhere-referred-to-as-Mr. Danyong lept to his death from his Oxfam-approved Foxconn dormitory digs on the 16th of July 2009 after meeting with a lone-nut interrogator.
Wired explains:
Foxconn has issued a statement [Google translation] apologizing for the incident. The letter admits that the chief of Foxconn’s central security division, surnamed Gu, may have used “inappropriate interrogation methods,” including possible beatings, searching Sun’s house and holding Sun in solitary confinement. Gu is on suspension and under internal investigation, according to Foxconn.
Gu allegedly did it first but that is not where it ended. One must conclude that a second lone-nut has replaced Gu given this Wiki entry:
From Jan 2010 to May 15 2010, nine Foxconn employees attempted suicide, with eight of them succeeding.
Xinhuanet figures things differently:
BEIJING, May 13 -- Taiwan-funded Foxconn Technology, a contract maker of the iPhone and other consumer electronics, insisted yesterday its treatment of workers was "world class" despite a woman, 24, becoming the sixth employee of its Chinese mainland factory to commit suicide this year.
Relief of the tragic mathematical sort is provided by analyst doctor Paul Kedrosky:
Let's do the sad math. The rate of suicide in China is, according to the WHO, 13.0 per 100,000 for men, and 14.8 per 100,000 for women (China is one of the few countries where the female suicide rate exceeds the male one). Given 300,000 employees at Foxconn's massive Shenzhen facility, we should, therefore, expect somewhere between 39 and 43 suicides a year -- tragedies, but also the interplay of known suicide rates and a large company population.
It is sad but true that annualized we would end up considerably lower than the 39 suicides figure cited above. In other words, it is entirely likely that Foxconn, however difficult its work environment, and however stressful its Apple relationship, is seeing a "suicide cluster" that is happening just by tragic chance.
Tragic chance is not an element addressed in the 1988 CDC suicide cluster recommendations. Unfortunate that - for Foxconn workers, especially "surname Zhu", the latest to leap beyond the daggers of happenstance.
Relief of the comic philosophical sort was offered by UK Telegraph Shanghai opinion blogger Malcolm Moore:
Others have said the current generation of migrant workers, who have opted to move from other parts of China to seek their fortunes in the country’s coastal factories, are not as tough as their forbears.
Carrying on, Moore seems to suggest that the Chinese government is quite stupid:
(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.)
The American government learned the easy way that alienation arising from the capitalist system must be taken advantage of as it develops. Those secrets are worth a bundle. There is nothing as lesson-effective as a shoebox full of fed notes, such as the one handed to a cog in the wheel who swooped up an iPhone at a bar. Bloomberg reports on the lost-and-found bought-and-paid-for iPhone incident which so far has left no one dead:
Gizmodo, which is owned by Gawker Media, said it purchased the phone for $5,000 after it was found at Gourmet Haus Stadt, a German beer hall in the San Francisco suburb of Redwood City. The phone was lost on March 25 by Apple engineer Gray Powell, according to the affidavit.
Futilely for Apple and fortuitously for a potential accomplice, authorities were informed of the deed:
Apple and law enforcement learned the identity of the man who sold the iPhone to Gizmodo, 21-year-old college student Brian Hogan, after his roommate contacted Apple, concerned that she might be implicated in the theft because Hogan had hooked up the prototype to her computer and it might be traced to her, Broad said in his affidavit.
Futilely for Apple and fortuitously for a potential accomplice, authorities were informed of the deed:
Apple and law enforcement learned the identity of the man who sold the iPhone to Gizmodo, 21-year-old college student Brian Hogan, after his roommate contacted Apple, concerned that she might be implicated in the theft because Hogan had hooked up the prototype to her computer and it might be traced to her, Broad said in his affidavit.
Computer World details the battle which left the iPhone bare while the experts and authorities discussed, examined and analyzed the exposure at their usual hourly rates.
Apple's bad press and the unfortunate incidents of theft are merely road signs to point the anti-Sir in the right direction. As long as Jobs corrects course - and there is little doubt he will - the suicides and the working conditions of Apple employees will be quietly buried with the Foxconn workers.
