I've seen good content on this blog before. This is so ridiculous, that combined with the fact that the author works for a competing consumer electronics company, I'd suggest deleting this post.
> they’re all killing themselves at the same place – at the Foxconn campus
There are dorms there. They'd really have to go out of their way to commit suicide somewhere else.
> Something deeper is happening that needs to be addressed.
The author doesn't know that something deeper is happening. He's just assuming it. And he conveniently ignored the part of the question where Jobs said that they're looking into it and have hired outside help. It is being addressed.
The point of the article is in hope that Apple or whomever are looking beyond stats and material stuff such as "they have a swimming pool", and seeing if there is a more underlying reason for it.
There may not be, which is fine. I'm simply questioning that they should be if they're not. Right now there is no evidence that they are other than they are looking at it. At what we don't know.
He wasn't using the swimming pool to show what the facility was, he was using it to show what it wasn't. It was just an example to show, that unlike at sweatshops, they had made investments in employee comfort and health. This appealed to me, as there is more at stake when manufacturing expensive electronics than manufacturing cheap clothes or soccer balls.
The author says the workers are killing themselves on the Foxconn campus instead of going home, but isn't the Foxconn campus also their home? At least some of the articles I've seen say the suicides have been at the dorms at Foxconn.
He means wherever they came from, or wherever their families are. So counting the number of employees who kill themselves on campus isn't counting employees or recent employees who kill themselves off-campus.
The suicide rate at Foxconn is much less than the rate in China as a whole, according to this. Doesn't this support the premise that Foxconn is actually a better place to work, in China?
> they’re all killing themselves at the same place – at the Foxconn campus
There are dorms there. They'd really have to go out of their way to commit suicide somewhere else.
> Something deeper is happening that needs to be addressed.
The author doesn't know that something deeper is happening. He's just assuming it. And he conveniently ignored the part of the question where Jobs said that they're looking into it and have hired outside help. It is being addressed.