Foxconn suicides

Based on Wikipedia: Foxconn suicides

The Nets Beneath the Windows

In 2010, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers began installing nets around its factory buildings. Not to catch falling equipment or debris. To catch falling people.

The company was Foxconn, a Taiwanese corporation that operates massive manufacturing complexes in mainland China. If you've ever owned an iPhone, an iPad, a PlayStation, or countless other electronic devices, there's a good chance your hands have held something assembled by a Foxconn worker. At its peak, the company employed nearly a million people at facilities across China—more workers than the population of San Francisco.

And in one terrible year, at least fourteen of those workers jumped to their deaths.

Inside Foxconn City

To understand what happened, you need to understand what Foxconn is. The company operates what's called "contract manufacturing"—they don't design or sell products under their own brand. Instead, they build things for other companies. Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon. The list of clients reads like a who's who of global technology.

Their main manufacturing hub was a place called Foxconn City, located in Shenzhen, China. The name isn't hyperbole. The facility employed up to 300,000 people at its peak—roughly the population of Pittsburgh. Workers lived in dormitories on site. They ate in company cafeterias. For many, especially young migrants from rural China, the factory complex was their entire world.

The work was grueling. Twelve-hour shifts. Six or seven days a week. Endless repetition on assembly lines. A 2010 investigation by twenty Chinese universities produced an 83-page report that used a striking phrase to describe the conditions: "labor camp."

Researchers interviewed 1,800 workers across twelve Foxconn facilities. They found illegal overtime. Unreported accidents. But beyond the legal violations, they documented something harder to quantify—a management culture they called "inhumane and abusive." Workers described discrimination, particularly against mainland Chinese employees by Taiwanese supervisors. They described isolation. In a facility with hundreds of thousands of people, workers reported having no real relationships with colleagues.

The Year of Death

The suicides didn't begin in 2010. Earlier years had seen deaths too. But 2010 was different. The pace was relentless.

January. February. March. The bodies kept falling.

One of those who died was Ma Xianqian, whose family would later protest outside the factory gates. Another was Lu Xin, a 24-year-old rural migrant worker who died on May 6th. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

For the first two and a half months, through six of the fourteen deaths, Foxconn said nothing. Literally nothing. Their official strategy was "no comment."

This was, by any measure, a catastrophic communications failure. As researchers who later studied the crisis noted, the silence allowed journalists to fill the void with their own narratives. The company's reputation suffered severe damage—damage that was largely self-inflicted through inaction.

When Foxconn finally did speak, they chose an approach that would backfire spectacularly. A spokesperson named Liu Kun adopted what communication experts call a "denial strategy." Instead of accepting any responsibility, he blamed the victims themselves. He blamed "societal problems." He blamed everything except the conditions inside Foxconn City.

The Waiver

What happened next defies belief.

Foxconn's management, apparently concerned about potential lawsuits from the families of suicide victims, came up with a solution. They asked employees to sign waivers. The documents stated that Foxconn would not be held liable if the worker who signed it subsequently died by suicide.

Think about that for a moment. Rather than address the conditions driving workers to kill themselves, the company's response was to protect itself from legal consequences.

The backlash was immediate and fierce. Foxconn was forced to retract the waivers. But the damage was done. The incident crystallized public perception of the company as one that valued its bottom line over human life.

A later version of this policy proved equally disturbing. Workers were eventually required to sign "legally-binding documents" guaranteeing that they and their descendants—their descendants—would not sue the company as a result of "unexpected death, self-injury, or suicide." The multigenerational scope of this demand revealed a company more concerned with perpetual legal immunity than with why its workers kept dying.

Suicide Nets and Buddhist Monks

In the wake of the crisis, Foxconn implemented a series of measures that ranged from practical to surreal.

The nets came first. Large mesh barriers were installed around buildings to catch anyone who jumped. It was a blunt solution—one that treated the symptom rather than the disease. The nets said: we acknowledge that our workers want to die, and our response is to make it physically harder for them to succeed.

Then came the monks. Foxconn brought in Buddhist clergy to conduct prayer sessions at the facilities. The spiritual intervention seemed designed more for public relations than genuine healing, though some workers may have found comfort in it.

Workers were also asked to sign "no-suicide pledges"—a darkly comic request when you consider that anyone determined to end their life would hardly be deterred by having signed a piece of paper.

There were also substantive changes. Wages at the Shenzhen facility were increased significantly, from 950 yuan per month to 1,200 yuan. That sounds meaningful until you learn the rest: production quotas were simultaneously raised by twenty percent. The raise came with strings attached. Work harder, faster, longer—and you might earn a bit more.

The Chairman Speaks

Terry Gou, Foxconn's billionaire chairman, eventually addressed the crisis at a press conference. His statement was revealing:

"We are certainly not running a sweatshop. We are confident we'll be able to stabilize the situation soon. A manufacturing team of 800,000 people is very difficult to manage."

The defensiveness was reflexive. The confidence was unconvincing. But that final sentence contained an inadvertent truth. Managing 800,000 people is indeed extraordinarily difficult. The question was whether that difficulty excused the results.

Apple's Response

The suicides forced Apple into an uncomfortable spotlight. The company that had built its brand on sleek design and premium quality now faced questions about the human cost of its products.

Apple's official statement struck a careful tone. Spokesperson Steven Dowling said the company was "saddened and upset" by the suicides and announced that Apple teams were "independently evaluating" Foxconn's response.

A broader Apple audit of its suppliers—conducted around the same time, though not specifically naming Foxconn—painted a troubling picture. The report acknowledged potential violations of labor laws and Apple's own supplier rules. It mentioned child labor, noting that workers as young as fourteen could legally work in China through special programs at that time.

Apple committed to implementing changes. But the commitment proved hollow. In late 2014, reports emerged of labor issues at yet another Chinese supplier. The pattern, it seemed, was not an aberration but a feature of the supply chain that produced the world's most valuable technology products.

A 2012 audit by the Fair Labor Association—commissioned by Apple itself—found evidence of commonplace workplace accidents at Foxconn and workers who considered their overtime pay insufficient. The problems persisted years after the suicide crisis had faded from headlines.

The Protests

The suicides sparked demonstrations across multiple continents.

In Hong Kong, activists from a group called Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour, or SACOM, staged a theatrical protest in the lobby of Foxconn's headquarters. They arranged mannequins on the floor and conducted funeral rites while a spokesperson addressed onlookers about "the high death rate" and "an abnormal number of workers committing suicide." Members of Hong Kong's trade union confederation joined them, carrying signs reading "Foxconn lacks a conscience" and "Suicide is no accident." Some protesters burned cardboard cutouts shaped like iPhones.

In Taipei, where Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai is headquartered, demonstrators laid flowers for the dead. Taiwanese labor activists unfurled banners with Chinese text that translated to: "For wealth and power—physical and mental health spent, hopes lost" and "For profit of the brand—youth spent, dreams shattered."

The protests reached America too. A small group picketed an Apple store in San Francisco, carrying placards listing the names and ages of the dead workers. It was a modest action, but it connected consumers directly to the human beings who had made their devices.

The Statistical Defense

Foxconn and its defenders advanced an argument that was technically accurate but morally hollow.

Yes, the absolute number of suicides was alarming. But look at the rate, they said. China has a high suicide rate—approximately 22 deaths per 100,000 people annually, according to data from around that time. Foxconn employed nearly a million people. By the math, you would expect roughly 200 suicides per year among such a large population. The fourteen deaths in 2010 were actually below the national average.

Steve Jobs himself deployed this argument, claiming Foxconn's suicide rate was lower than that of the United States.

The Economist echoed this reasoning, noting that while the absolute numbers were "large," the rate remained below China's overall suicide rate.

This defense, while statistically defensible, missed the point entirely. These weren't random people scattered across China. They were workers in a single employer's facilities, living in company dormitories, working company shifts, subject to company rules. The relevant question wasn't whether Foxconn's suicide rate exceeded the national average. It was whether something about Foxconn's specific environment was causing people to kill themselves—and if so, whether the company bore responsibility for changing it.

A Different View

Not everyone agreed that Foxconn was unusually abusive. Boy Lüthje, a researcher at Germany's Institute of Social Research, offered a counterpoint. He noted that Foxconn paid at least the minimum wage and provided free recreational facilities, food, and lodging at some factory complexes. Compared to other Chinese manufacturers, he suggested, Foxconn treated employees relatively well.

The caveat was telling: "Overtime, however, may be routinely demanded."

This captured the paradox of Foxconn's position. By the standards of Chinese manufacturing, the company wasn't necessarily the worst offender. But the standards of Chinese manufacturing were themselves the problem. When your defense is "we're better than other sweatshops," you've already lost the moral argument.

The Broader Context

The Foxconn suicides didn't occur in isolation. The year 2010 saw widespread labor unrest across China. Major strikes erupted at multiple high-profile manufacturers. Something was shifting in the relationship between Chinese workers and their employers.

Economists pointed to a concept called the Lewis turning point, named after the Nobel laureate W. Arthur Lewis. The theory describes what happens when a developing economy exhausts its supply of cheap rural labor. Workers gain leverage. They demand better conditions and higher wages. Employers who built their business models on unlimited cheap labor face a reckoning.

China in 2010 was approaching or perhaps reaching this turning point. The suicides at Foxconn could be understood, in part, as the human cost of an economic model running up against its limits. Workers who had accepted brutal conditions because they had no alternatives were beginning to demand more. Some found their demands ignored. A few, tragically, saw no way forward at all.

Echoes

The suicides left cultural traces beyond news headlines and academic papers.

A band called James Supercave recorded a song titled "Chairman Gou." The lyrics directly addressed the crisis, mentioning both Terry Gou and the young worker Lu Xin who had died that May. The song captured the surreal corporate response in two cutting lines: "Hire a hundred telephones / To talk the kids out of meaninglessness" and "Pay the right man to build a suicide net."

The song's existence is a reminder that these events entered the cultural consciousness. For a moment, at least, people who had never thought about where their phones came from were forced to reckon with the answer.

What the Nets Mean

The suicide nets are still there. If you search for images of Foxconn facilities, you can find them—mesh barriers stretching around building perimeters, ready to catch anyone who jumps.

They're a monument to corporate pragmatism. Installing nets is cheaper than transforming working conditions. It's faster than addressing the alienation and despair that drove workers to jump. The nets don't solve the problem. They just make the problem someone else's.

In January 2012, nearly 150 Chinese workers at a Foxconn facility threatened mass suicide. They climbed onto a roof and demanded negotiations over working conditions and pay. They were talked down. The nets weren't needed that day.

As recently as 2016, suicides continued. A Wall Street Journal reporter documented the death of a 31-year-old night shift worker at Foxconn's Zhengzhou facility that August.

The story, it turns out, didn't end in 2010. It just stopped being front-page news.

The Price of Our Devices

There's an uncomfortable question embedded in the Foxconn suicides, one that implicates anyone who has ever bought a smartphone or a laptop or a gaming console.

These devices are miracles of engineering. They connect us to the world. They fit the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets. And they are astonishingly cheap for what they do.

That cheapness comes from somewhere.

It comes from factories where hundreds of thousands of people work twelve-hour shifts doing repetitive tasks. It comes from supply chains optimized to extract every possible efficiency. It comes from places where the response to a suicide epidemic is to install nets rather than to fundamentally rethink how the work is done.

The companies at the top of these supply chains—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony—publish corporate social responsibility reports. They conduct audits. They express sadness when workers die. But the underlying economics remain unchanged. The pressure for cheap products flows downward through the supply chain until it lands on the shoulders of workers in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou and a dozen other cities.

The nets beneath the windows are not just Foxconn's shame. They're a physical manifestation of trade-offs that the entire consumer electronics industry has made. They're the visible symbol of an invisible bargain.

Every time we unlock our phones, we're holding the result of that bargain in our hands.