“More than a constant companion”
Are people finally sleeping with their smart phones?. Bowing to the clearly superior intelligence? Wouldn’t shock me.
How many workers making two bucks a day at Foxconn killed themselves in despair, in that commie hellhole where the beloved product was disgorged?
The answer is: “Who cares?”
Not me, certainly. But it does make you think ...
Very few. You fall for propaganda that means NOTHING. The suicide rate at all of FoxConn at the height of the breathless claims of suicide at FoxConn in 2010 and 2011 was less than 1 per 100,000 workers per year, yet you are decrying that "horrendous" rate, when the suicide rate among American young people in the SAME AGE GROUPS attending Ivy League Universities was 11 per 100,000 per year!
During the years of 2010-2011, during an 18 month period, there were just 18 suicides among all of FoxConn's many plants, where between 750,000 (early 2010) to 1,000,000 (mid 2011) people between the ages of 18 and 32 worked. FoxConn CEO Terry Gou was making it a personal practice to compensate the families of the workers who killed themselves with a cash payment of between 20 to 25 times the workers' annual salary.
Outside, independent investigators found that the suicides at FoxConn had NOTHING to do with working conditions but were instead the normal psychological conditions one would find in the usual mix of people. Some of the suicides were due to psychiatric problems, three left notes that stated they killed themselves for the financial reward for the families, noting they were worth more to their families dead than alive, and several others mentioned the award to co-workers before they died. When Gou was apprised of these motives, he ceased making these large payments in favor of the government workers' compensation payments and the suicides essentially stopped!
The worst spate of suicides occurred at a plant assembling Microsoft X-boxes, Nokia cellular phones, Sony Playstations, and HP Computers. . . not a single suicide occurred at a plant assembling any Apple products.
After those 2010-2011 suicides, the suicide rate at FoxConn fell to near ZERO and in 2013, there were, in fact ZERO suicides at all 27 FoxConn plants which employed a total of over 1,500,000 workers, resulting in a ZERO SUICIDE RATE.
Workers on Apple's assembly lines are paid between 2.4 to 3.5 times the regular factory wages. It is for this reason that workers queue by the thousand to apply for work on those lines when openings become available. Apple also specifies minimum working conditions and then place Apple paid monitors to assure those conditions and wages are met. Apple has actually pulled multi-billion dollar contracts from suppliers who failed to meet those conditions!
YOU do not know what you are talking about.
These "suicide claims" and "poor working conditions" at slave labor have been shot down multiple times. They come from a NEW YORK based organization called China Labor Watch that has been caught falsifying evidence and using faked videos, and mis-translating worker interviews from Chinese to English to misconstrue what the worker actually said. They have NO presence at all in China. Their purpose is to raise funds of which less than 2% is ever expended on programs for Chinese workers.
By-the-way, the workers at FoxConn, even on non-Apple assembly lines, earn around $2.34 an hour! Not two bucks a day. . . And those rates were back in 2013. They've had raises since then. The standard Chinese minimum wage for factory work was around $1.14 an hour then. . . Which was better than the 68¢ per hour minimum wage for clerks and office work!
However to put those prices in perspective, a two bedroom apartment in the city rented for around $70 per month. One bedroom for $60. Although there was no time-and-a-half overtime, most workers took advantage of liberal overtime policies allowing 60 hours of optional overtime per month.