[paulerdos]

It is hard to know who to believe. The journalist who has something to gain by exaggerating the suffering of the workers, or the company which has much more to gain by hiding the suffering. The truth is somewhere in between. Based on the Foxconn on-the-job-site suicide rate being significantly higher than other on-the-job-site suicide rates (important to compare apples-with-apples, no pun intended), the truth probably lies closer to the journalist version.

[glenra]

What evidence suggests the suicide rate for Foxconn workers is "significantly higher" than would otherwise be expected?

Near as I can tell, the only complaint is that there was a large raw number of suicides a while ago...in a company so huge it has more workers than the population of Wyoming. Last time I looked it up, the suicide rate there seemed to be lower than the rate among chinese people, lower than the rate among chinese college students, lower than the rate among US factory workers and so on. And that problem was largely in the past, not an ongoing issue.

[paulerdos]

"lower than the rate among US factory workers". This is a common comparison fallacy. The baserates you appear to be comparing with are all general population baserate. The baserate that I was thinking about was how many factory workers committed suicide on-site. That is the Apples-to-Apples comparison. Eg: How many Apple employees committed suicide on campus vs how many Foxconn employees committed suicide at their factory camp/dorm.

[glenra]

That is NOT a relevant comparison. Foxconn employees live in dormitories on-site while US factory workers don't, so you'd essentially be trying to compare ALL the suicides of Foxconn employees to SOME of the suicides of other workers. (Though I'm not sure they'd fail even THAT comparison.)

If I recall correctly, even the rate at which Americans are murdered on the job is higher than the rate at which Foxconn employees commit suicide there. So if you want to keep claiming there's something uniquely bad about Foxcon in this regard, let's hear some actual numbers from you. What specific numbers are you looking at that lead you to believe Foxconn is unusually bad?

[misnome]

If you are comparing apples-to-apples, then surely you should weight your statement on who to believe by how easy it is for each person to exaggerate/hide.

It's super easy for a journalist to exaggerate something like this, with relatively little risk for a massive gain. On the other hand, a "Company" hiding things involves many, many more people involved in the conspiracy, and the penalty for failure isn't really that much (how many decades of big-companies-with-bad-working-conditions stories have we had?).

It also doesn't give any sense of context - how reliable the newspaper is, what the average working conditions are for that class of facility, etc etc.

Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.

[paulerdos]

You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...

[smoyer]

"Apples-to-apples" ... perfect wording!

[cooldeal]

>Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.

The story is about making an iPhone 5, which is expected to boost the GDP of the US. http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-...

As we're constantly reminded by the Apple blogs and on here, Apple takes 75% of the profits in the phone industry and have huge margins which their competitors can't come close to, so isn't it logical that Apple gets more of the bad press for bad working conditions since they are in the best position to improve the workers' pathetic work and living environment?