Matt Meets the Internet - ‘Mass suicide’ protest of workers at Chinese manufacturing plant for Apple products

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Hi, I'm Matt, and this is where my world meets the internet, in real time. I'm an American teaching English at a middle school in South Korea. I'm here with my fiancee; it's our third year here. This is a place for things I find interesting, absurd, funny, outrageous and awesome. I am a wannabe homesteader, future farmer, appreciator of photography, and I follow American politics closely. Follow along as I also contribute my thoughts on Taoism for everyday life, inspired from the daily meditations of 365 Tao, by Deng Ming Dao.

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January 27, 2012

‘Mass suicide’ protest of workers at Chinese manufacturing plant for Apple products | Telegraph

socialismartnature:

This is especially outrageous given that the new CEO of Apple got a salary package in 2011 of $378 million! A huge portion of this CEO’s money comes directly from the immense profits squeezed out of these Chinese workers in the form of low wages, long hours, and a breakneck pace of production.

Capitalism in a nutshell.

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Around 150 Chinese workers at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, threatened to commit suicide by leaping from their factory roof in protest at their working conditions.

By Malcolm Moore, in Shanghai

January 11, 2012

The workers were eventually coaxed down after two days on top of their three-floor plant in Wuhan by Foxconn managers and local Chinese Communist party officials.

Foxconn, which manufactures gadgets for the likes of Apple, Sony, Nintendo and HP, among many others, has had a grim history of suicides at its factories. A suicide cluster in 2010 saw 18 workers throw themselves from the tops of the company’s buildings, with 14 deaths.

In the aftermath of the suicides, Foxconn installed safety nets in some of its factories and hired counsellors to help its workers.

The latest protest began on January 2 after managers decided to move around 600 workers to a new production line, making computer cases for Acer, a Taiwanese computer company.

“We were put to work without any training, and paid piecemeal,” said one of the protesting workers, who asked not to be named. “The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black. The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it,” he said.

Several reports from inside Foxconn factories have suggested that while the company is more advanced than many of its competitors, it is run in a “military” fashion that many workers cannot cope with. At Foxconn’s flagship plant in Longhua, five per cent of its workers, or 24,000 people, quit every month.

12:46pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZkUqIxFR8sNd
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