14 DAY TRIAL // Another Foxconn employee allegedly working at an iPhone X manufacturing plant has committed suicide by jumping to death off a building on Saturday.
China Labor Watch (CLW), a workers’ rights organization, says 31-year-old Li Ming was hired by Foxconn only two months ago through an agency. It is unclear why he decided to take his own life, but according to a report from The Telegraph, the suicide brings back in the spotlight the working conditions at Foxconn factories. It appears Li lived in factory dormitories, but Foxconn hasn’t provided any confirmation in this regard.
Foxconn, which employs more than 1.2 million and is the biggest private sector employer in China, builds some 50 percent of iPhones in the city of Zhengzhou, with local workforce in excess of 350,000.
The company is no stranger of employee suicides, as working conditions in production plants have also been criticized and cited as one particular reason for staff taking their lives.
A decade of suicides
The cited source goes through a timeline of suicides committed by Foxconn employees, with the first case reported in 2009. A 25-year-old man jumped from his apartment building after he was beaten up by Foxconn security guards for losing an iPhone prototype, though the aggression has never been confirmed by the parent company.
14 Foxconn employees jumped off buildings throughout the next year because of the working conditions, which triggered the company to install safety nets in 2012 to prevent workers from killing themselves. During the same year, 150 workers threatened with mass suicide by jumping from a factory in Wuhan, Hubei, due to the same difficult working conditions.
Apple has always tried to take workers’ side, promising better working conditions at Foxconn’s factories, despite all these suicide jumps proving otherwise. Former CEO Steve Jobs said in 2010 that “Foxconn is not a sweatshop.”
“It's a factory – but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters... but it's a factory. But they've had some suicides and attempted suicides – and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it's still troubling,” he said.
Foxconn workers who have threatened to commit suicide claim otherwise, with some saying they’ve been forced to work in conditions that are hard to imagine.
"The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hand was black,” some have been quoted as saying by the same source. “The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it.”
Apple hasn’t released a statement on this new case, but comments from Foxconn are expected soon.