Foxconn worker from Chengdu factory commits suicide

woops wrong article, please delete! how to delete?

it is still lower. 1 or 2 out of 100k is even better than 200 out of 1 Million which would be the nation average or 20 per 100k - Did you see what I did there? Do you remember in math class when you asked the teacher where in the real world you would use stuff like fractions and ratios? ...

Sure let's lay off half of Foxconn who's already doing our dirty work for us. That will solve the problem...

It would take far more dollars, time, and r&d to develop the robot, program it, maintain it, manufacture it and install it, then train people how to use it than it would be to just pay Foxconn to handle it. Don't forget, you also need to repeat some of those phases for every different product Apple makes.

For the most part, Apple's products are getting simpler to assemble, and they are coming in fewer pieces with each revision. I remember how hard it was to take apart my powerbook g4 to remove the hard drive. I recently took apart a macbook pro which had cola spilled in it. Aside from the 51 screws holding the keyboard to the frame, there were easily half as many pieces and far less kapton tape.

I don't think disabused slaves is a fair representation. Unless you've been to Shenzhen, Chengdu or any of the other cities where Foxconn factories are located and can speak from first hand experience, I'm assuming you've read a bunch of headlines about suicides and deduced from there that only slaves could work under such conditions.

A couple of things, take a look at this article:

http://gizmodo.com/t/shenzhennotes

I look at those images and I don't think sweatshop or slave labor, I think college campus. Maybe these images aren't anywhere as cool as Google's campus or where the Pixar peeps work, but, for a developing nation (that has a huge chunk of its people living in dire poverty), Foxconn's working conditions look alright.

Also, as a tangential aside, several years ago I was at college at NYU. During my freshman year (in fact only in the first 2 months), several students committed suicide (by jumping from the school's various city buildings). It was an alarming number of suicides for such a well known school and for such a short time frame, but these suicides were treated on an individual basis. No one railed against the school for harsh learning conditions, or anything like that. Since Foxconn suicides are below the national average and since they employ nearly a million people, perhaps we should treat these suicides similarly, on an individual basis.

Otherwise, we're saying these workers have no personality, no social problems, no issues with societal culture and no personal lives that may be leading to their suicidal tendencies, and instead it must be the working conditions.

There is stuff that legally carries "Made in the USA" labels that is made by workers in far worse conditions. Just look up Saipan Sweatshops for a little background.

As far as statistics go more people that have made Sony products have committed suicide than those that have made Apple products.