This has been ongoing for a long time.
Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city - article 2010
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract
Foxconn’s enormous Longhua plant is a major manufacturer of Apple products.
The corporate response spurred further unease: Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies.
Many photos of nets draping buildings if you google: apple nets around building
Click on Images.
This Guardian story is full of hype and fake news. It reads as if the narrative came from hype provided by the Bogus China Labor Watch which has been caught pushing counterfeit translations and faked videos claiming they were showing Apple work conditions when they were not.
Openings at Apple’s assembly lines have hundreds if not thousands of applicants for each position as the pay is higher and working conditions are better. There have been numerous videos on line of such queues of applicants applying for those FoxConn Apple jobs over the years. They are not given by "just walking in" as characterized in this article. There is stiff competition for those jobs.
The claims of the suicides occurring there are completely bogus. The contemporary articles from 2011, 2012, and 2013 place them where the investigation found they ACTUALLY occurred, not at an Apple assembly plant. Even your claim this article is from 2010 is bogus. The news did not break until sometime in 2011, after the iPad sales started booming. The date of this article is Sun 18 Jun 2017 04.30 EDT. I authored multiple contemporary articles on the suicides and did in-depth research. I had details on each of the victims and dates. I put a lot of time into that research. At the time, FoxConn had 26 plants across China, and the 18 suicides occurred at four of them over an eighteen month period ending in 2011, not a single year with a spate of six at one plant in six weeks in 2011. There was only one suicide in China associated with Apple products. That occurred in 2009 when a young FoxConn assembly line design engineer was arrested, accused of stealing a prototype iphone being used to aide in the new assembly line prep, and questioned for twelve hours by police. He was released, went home to his tower apartment, then went up on the 24 story building and jumped. This was unrelated to the 2010-2011 suicides.
The outside independent investigation brought in from outside China discovered the suicides occurred for various reasons, mostly unrelated to each other, including mental illness, jealousy, homesickness, disease, a love triangle, and then there was the financial incentives to assist the victim families.
It seems that CEO Terry Gou had started making bereavement pay to victims’ families from his own personal funds of the equivalent of about twenty years of the deceased worker’s full pay. Some young people decided they could do more for their families dead than alive, so they killed themselves to aid their families in one fell swoop. Gou made a company wide announcement he would no longer pay bereavement for suicide deaths and the company would henceforth only pay the state mandated compensation work related death benefits. The suicides stopped. The following year, FoxConn had a suicide rate of 0 among its approximately 1 million workers and just one the following year. That very low rate has continued since then. None of the facts related in this article on those suicides are accurate.
I will again repeat the investigation determined the various suicides had been working on assembly lines making Microsoft Xboxes, HP Computers, and Sony PlayStation consoles. .. not Apple devices. In the case of the 160 to 200 or so workers claimed to have threatened to jump en-mass from a factory roof over pay issues, it was not even a FoxConn plant but a competitor, who had switched these workers from an assembly line where their work gave them ample opportunity for overtime and therefore extra money, to a line making computer cases which required no overtime at all, ergo no extra money. They wanted the overtime opportunity back, and were threatening to jump unless they could get their old jobs back! Apparently they won their bargaining point.
The author treats FoxConn as if only Apple products are made there. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that FoxConn contracts with over 750 of the Consumer Electronics and Consumer Appliance manufacturers in the world to manufacture and assemble their products for them. Apple is just one of them, probably the single largest now, but FoxConn is actually a Taiwanese company and even manufacturers Japanese, Korean, and German electronics
It may have been making Apple products circa 2017, it was not in 2010-2011. Apple builds new lines for new products while the old line continues building the old product for at least two more years. They move, sometime jumping cities or even countries. Some models of iPads are being built in Vietnam and Malaysia.
Brian Merchant conflates three different supposed FoxConn suicide stories and gets ALL THREE totally wrong in his anti-Apple, anti-capitalism zeal, and his strange capitalistic urge to sell his book. The real story should be ‘How does a company with 1.5 million workers have a current annual suicide rate of less than 0.1 per 100,000 in a nation with a 20 per 100,000 rate?” As usual, the Progressive Journallist misses the real story!
Quit beating your dead horse.