It's hard to remember sometimes that all the people in the world that live lives so much worse than ours still have their own hopes and dreams, their own aspirations and imaginations.
This article made me quite sad, despite the great poetry.
I agree in every respect, but also hesitate to say lives "worse" than our own. Different indeed, but I don't have an inkling of how to understand any of the varied Chinese cultures or social classes. Nor can I fully appreciate what would be required to compare the quality of those lives, with such different belief structures and goals.
I can only see a beautiful soul snuffed out and wonder why he chose that route. But then, even that is skewed by my culture of freedom and my religious beliefs.
The differences between Chinese and Western values matter little in this context. Sure, you could make an argument that their social culture which values hard work would promote these working conditions, but that is irrelevant.
"Worse", despite its subjective meaning, can arguably be used objectively in this case. To be quite frank, Foxconn treats its workers like trash [1]. It's a throwback to the labor rights violations of early industrial America. While you may sit back in your chair and type away that you can't possibly call their lives worse, you nor I would ever want to be caught in an environment like theirs.
There's a huge difference between a culture that values hard work, and one that also knows the respect which its workers deserve.
I was also referring more broadly to the world in general.
I am a white upper-middle-class knowledge worker who lives in Canada, so I suspect I can objectively say that most of the people in the world are worse off than I am, in terms of security, comfort and stability.
But that doesn't mean they are any less human, or any less worthy of a good and decent life, and the fact that so many are denied that makes me sad.
I do what I can (supporting charities and organizations who help, and doing what I can in my personal life), but it's still easy to feel helpless about the whole thing...
Suicide is a tragedy and people should always do what they can to prevent it. However, it is also something that will always occur in some portion of the population, typically as the result of depression. We should not ignore the fact that the suicide rate in, for example, the United States is an order of magnitude higher than it is at Foxconn. Foxconn employs over 1.2 million people, so the number of suicides will appear high compared with other, smaller companies. Working conditions are tough, the cultural environment is difficult for people with depression (which can be said for almost every culture), and the company could invest more resources to provide help to those in need. But we cannot 'fix' depression, and it's irresponsible to divert attention from the underlying mental health issue to blame the employer for all the employees who have committed suicide.
You should try reading the article next time -- this post has absolutely nothing to do with suicide rates.
I guess your response is somewhat appropriate though. Like the company he worked for, you didn't even stop for a second to think of Xu as a human being, he was just a means to an end. In your case, that end being the collection free internet brownie points by posting a contrarian opinion.
That's unfair. The article starts off by referencing suicide rates; the website exists to argue against workplace iniquity rather than celebrate creative output.
It's actually reading the surrounding details of Xu's life deeper into the article, and particularly his poetry, that makes it abundantly clear that more was preying upon his mind than long hours and an institutional environment.
My intent was to supply a relevant perspective missing from the article. Each individual story of suicide is tragic. Xu Lizhi's poetry and perspective are extremely valuable in helping outsiders connect to the experience of depression, and in no way am I trying to undermine his experience or the reality of suicide.
To the extent that the article uses his story as a commentary on Foxconn as a company, however, it is important to provide broader context alongside the deeply personal experience. The underlying issues contributing to depression and suicide are universal, but it is easy to cast blame on specific contexts.
Even ignoring the article, the only context for Foxconn most people in the world have (assuming they have any at all) is "suicide rate". That's it.
That's what the news media has always done: Turned things that were stories, be they true or be they false, into context, to be inserted subconsciously whenever certain keywords get mentioned.
The suicide rate in federal prisons is lower than that of the general population as well. Does that mean that the quality of life is higher in federal prisons? Or is it simply that Foxconn employees feel so trapped by their conditions they are deprived of even the ability to take their own life? Perhaps with enough rhetorical gymnastics we can disassociate Xu Lizhi's experience from the electronics in our pockets and our own culpability in the suffering of others. If you wish to discuss the underlying mental health issues than do so. In the meantime I think criticism of Foxconn, Apple, Samsung, and the systemic use of neofeudal labor is perfectly valid.
I'm not sure this is what GP was addressing, but there is a very real phenomenon of getting so depressed that you can't even manage to kill yourself. You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.
But we have no evidence that this is the case. At first people kept saying "Foxconn employees kill themselves a lot, so they're depressed", and now they're saying "Foxconn employees don't kill themselves as much as we do, so they're depressed". It seems to me that people here are simply predisposed to believe that Foxconn employees are depressed, and are willing to take pretty much anything as evidence for that belief.
> You actually see increased risk of suicide at the beginning of therapy for some patients, where they come up enough to get just enough mental energy to successfully kill themselves.
This is something that happens (mostly with bipolar people who go into manic states, it actually doesn't typically happen with severe depression cases), but in terms of risk, no you are wrong, statistically you see decreased risk immediately after starting any kind of depression treatment:
It seems a little to easy to reduce the situation to a "Once Foxconn employees stop killing themselves at X rate we can consume Apple products guilt free." type of equation, doesn't it?
Edit: The article is relatively weak. There's many more interesting case studies of nations and cultures that went from a near 0 suicide rate to sudden spikes.
Without claiming any authority on the subject, I would suggest that suicide can be seen as a 'luxury'* in certain cases:
Isn't it that much harder to "undo yourself" when you have dependents on you that have no other alternative?
If it takes $x units of depression to take your own life while responsibility-free, wouldn't it take 10 * $x to do so while knowing that you're leaving your children to the STATE?
* Bad choice of word considering the context, but I can't find another. I hope you get what I mean.
If you've never been depressed I don't think you can understand what someone in that mind-state might think, and thinking: "my kids would be better off with anyone than me" is the exact sort of thing a suicidally depressed person might say.
We should not ignore the fact that the suicide rate in, for example, the United States is an order of magnitude higher than it is at Foxconn.
I looked at the figures for this. They are all talking about suicides by employees while on Foxconn property, not total suicide rate of current and recent employees.
The second poem actually gives quite a bit of insight regarding his situation. Translation from Chinese to English is hard and much is lost in translation. I'll translate the following to prose as to minimize what's lost in the translation:
《冲突》
"Conflict"
他们都说
They all say
我是个话很少的孩子
I'm a child of few words
对此我并不否认
This I don't deny
实际上
But actually
我说与不说
Whether I speak or not
都会跟这个社会
With this society I'll still
发生冲突
Conflict
"They've always told me that I was a quiet child. I do not deny that fact, however, whether I speak up or not doesn't alter the fact that I feel incompatible with this society."
The main beef I have with the translation is that conflict is a very explicit word whereas Chinese is much more implicit. It's pretty obvious that there was a large disconnect with what he wanted out of society vs reality. This is unfortunately quite common in China.
Being someone who grew up reading Chinese novels extensively, I can attest that the culture itself is heavily romanticized and when compared to the modern subversion influenced by the communist party, it's figuratively night and day.
As a native Chinese speaker, I would contend "conflict" is a more suitable word choice.
In Chinese, he doesn't qualify the final three sentences as his own feeling. The phrase "I feel" in English is usually used to indicate uncertainty/lack of objectivity. Instead, he uses "都会", whose strength, certainty and sense of inevitability are better represented by "I will" or "I'll" in English. In Chinese, the final line is a verb. By using the verb form of "conflict" as the last word in English as is done in the Chinese, the correct emphasis is placed on "conflict" as it is done on "冲突".
Ouch, they really did put a dent in my day. They were beautiful, however, and reading them really humanized Xu Lizhi more than simply reading about him in the article.
《冲突》
"Conflict"
他们都说
They all say
我是个话很少的孩子
I'm a child of few words
对此我并不否认
This I don't deny
实际上
But actually
我说与不说
Whether I speak or not
都会跟这个社会
With this society I'll still
发生冲突
Conflict
-- 7 June 2013
Wow, beautiful poetry. The article, and recently a documentary on the garment trade in Bangledesh [1] had me thinking about ethical consumption. Ever since watching "The Story of Stuff" [2] I've wanted a way to easily understand the ethical implications of purchases. I'd like to scan a bar code and get a 1-to-5 rating of how ethical and fair the product life cycle is - something like that. I'd be willing to pay more, and do with less, if it meant knowing that my purchases contributed to a healthy work-life balance, living wage, and... well, hope, basically, for the various people involved in the production chain. The Fair Trade label on my coffee doesn't go very far to quell the inner conviction that stories like this increasingly raise. I don't really care for a gold iGadget, or whatever, but I'd love one that's built with empathy. I don't buy the argument that fair-trade is a luxury for the upper middle class. I think it would benefit everyone and contribute to a more participatory economy. [3]
Capitalism indeed seems to consign the masses to work that is drudgery and is intellectually beneath them, but so does socialism.
Every socialist experiment I'm familiar with has almost instantly devolved into a form of a capitalism based on social pull with the bureaucracy rather than financial leverage. The final endpoint of this trajectory seems to be the mafia state -- pure social pull capitalism within criminal-state complex hierarchies.
If there's a solution here, it may not lie within politics as we ordinarily think about it.
Check out the anarchist socialist experiments like Catalonia during the Spanish civil war. They tended to collapse because of inability to fight external forces, not because of bureaucratic bloat, etc.
Interesting. But I still wonder how they'd fare in the long term. Would they maintain their cooperative state or devolve into mafia statism as most experiments in radical socialism seem to do.
I completely agree that solutions probably don't lie within politics as usual. But, from the perspective libcom would have you adopt, we should go to "liberatarian communism". The real irony here is that libcom is trying to spread this brand of communism by highlighting a tragedy in a country that has seen the fastest rise out of poverty in the history of the world due to, ahem, free market economic reforms.
I think that you are simplifying the perspective of the bloggers here. They have been writing updates on workers struggles and other incidents of civil unrest in China over the last few decades, and I think that, from a libertarian communist perspective, the struggling workers would be seen as the most important agent of social change,the 'rise out of poverty' as you phrased it, in China over this period, rather than the states supposed embrace of free market capitalism (which itself is a complicated issue).
i'm not posting this as an advocation of hoxhaism but the case of albania is an interesting one that most english speaking people don't seem to be familiar with
Does anyone else think that it is rather sad that the comments at the bottom of the article are bickering about the the licensing issues of the poetry? Although, it is an important issue, this article is probably not the most appropriate forum for the discussion.
He ordered some books five days prior to the tragedy which makes me wonder if he is planned the suicide or not. Also I wondered if he has any poems that is relatively more positive. But it is just sad that these poems are so striking. Simply a loss.
What if we didn't buy electronics, or what if we insisted on treating these workers so well it made more sense to leave the factories in the US? Then our money stays here and young men and women like Xu are back in their villages trying to scrape out a living on a few square meters of soil. Workers take these jobs because it's an opportunity to improve their life and the lives of their families. It may still be miserable compared to what it "should" or "could" be but the fact is it's better than the alternative.
We should definitely do what we can as consumers to pressure the companies and governments in our supply chain to improve the quality of life for their laborers. I'm just saying that the alternative world where these guys are all living out peaceful, prosperous lives just "because" is not one that has ever existed either.
This argument always comes up and its an argument I hate. If for no other reason, I dislike it because from what I've seen rates of depression are dramatically higher when you introduce these sorts of jobs vs. letting people scrape by working land in a 3rd world setting.
What you're arguing is (excuse the hyperbolic nature of the example) that slavery is better than leaving indigenous people in their natural setting. Your argument makes sense from an economic perspective but I don't believe it holds water when you account for quality of life.
FWIW, I've been to Shenzhen and actually ended up in a hotel across the street from the big Foxconn campus where I assume Xu worked. At shift change time an unbelievable army comes rolling out; I believe it's over 100,000 workers per shift although most live on-campus. But they looked pretty much like any group of blue collar workers I've ever seen getting off work. They were talking, smiling, laughing, eating snacks.
15 years ago I saw some of rural China. I saw a lot of dirty, leathery, gap-toothed people, and it seemed most couldn't afford shoes. The population density was incredible, with entire families working plots of land that weren't any bigger than suburban yards.
These days, to be fair, it's gotten quite a bit better in the countryside as the Chinese economy has boomed, food prices have risen, and many people have moved to the city. People look healthier, wear shoes, have plumbing. But for the sake of comparing the "indigenous" life I don't think it's fair to look at the post-industrialized state.
I guess in short I'm saying it's not fair to over-dramatize the difference and think about shackled slaves vs. native warriors riding around grassy plains. I think ultimately it's only fair to ask the people themselves and I think you will find that the average Chinese worker is far happier with the direction their life and country are moving in than the average American.
> rates of depression are dramatically higher when you introduce these sorts of jobs vs. letting people scrape by working land in a 3rd world setting
First of all, I don't think there's anyway you can assert that. We have no real data about what depression rates were like when these jobs were introduced.
Second of all, the notion that all of these people could be simple, back to the earth farmers is the alternative is all kinds of incorrect.
Third, the notion that even if they were back to the earth farmers they would be happier than factory workers is also one that, from what I've seen, is based entirely on sentiment and not on evidence.
That's assuming the workers could afford food before. I seem to recall that when eastern child labor shops were shut down at the behest of Westerners, we found that child labor dropped- and starvation and kids in the sex trade both increased.
It's wrong to assume indigenous people need saving, but IMO it's also wrong to assume their lives were great before.
I'm on this wavelength, but I don't think we can all dial down our behavior to nil quickly.
Instead, I think a good start would be to buy less electronics, e.g. only when they wear out, instead of just buying the new thing b/c it will outperform other people.
Also, to repair the electronics we have and buy electronics that are designed to be maintainable and long-lasting.
This is one of those moments where I'm utterly distressed by the lack of a solution to curb all the frivolous consumerism of the world.
I don't think frivolous consumerism is the cause, it's what humans will do to others to get ahead. In other words, greed. The people that run the factories don't view the people as human, otherwise they wouldn't be able to treat them like machines.
I'm inclined to believe that Foxconn and its ilk exist because there is an insatiable need for the latest and greatest gadgets.
I absolutely agree that greed will always be a major factor in the equation but I can't help but think that our rabid consumerism is the culprit providing the opportunity for the greedy to reign.
Let's turn this around. Let's look at coal miners and the problems they've gone through. I don't think the consumers of coal would be considered frivolous or the cause of the bad conditions of the miners. It's the companies that want to squeeze out that last drop of profit at the expense of their workers. That's the problem.
Humans can abuse other humans for any reason, and greed is the cause.
The more separated someone is from a situation the less they relate. People buying smartphones are removed enough from the working conditions at Foxconn that it's of little significance.
It applies in almost every corner of the world. If Ebola didn't start in a struggling, impoverished and black country there would be a lot more attention being paid to it as a crisis.
This is really where I'm at a loss as of what to do, will the intersection of all human worldly values and ethics ever include sustainably living and shaming or preventing others who don't?
Does poetry like this keep people from suicide or make it more likely? To focus on your grief, to not speak of it and then to bottle it up into poetry seems dangerous.
This isn't an Apple thing, it is an Industry thing.
> Major customers of Foxconn include or have included:
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)[49]
Amazon.com (United States)[12]
Apple Inc. (United States)[50]
BlackBerry Ltd. (Canada)[51]
Cisco (United States)[52]
Dell (United States)[53]
Google (United States)[54]
Hewlett-Packard (United States)[55]
Microsoft (United States)[56]
Motorola Mobility (United States)[53]
Nintendo (Japan)[57]
Nokia (Finland)[50][58]
Sony (Japan)[59]
Toshiba (Japan)[60]
Vizio (United States)[61]
Everyone and their mum. I would expect companies missing from this list to still be using another `instanceof Foxconn`.
<sarcasm>But worry not, they're right on top of this problem</sarcasm>
> Insiders report that thereafter, although the frequency of suicides decreased (_mainly due to Foxconn's installation of nets making it more difficult for workers to jump from their dormitories_, along with the development of workers' collective resistance), such suicides have continued to the present.
(from article)
Installing nets isn't necessarily a terrible thing. Suicide is often impulsive and so suicide prevention often features mechanisms to reduce access to methods of suicide. Installing nets is one example.
Of course, once you've retrieved someone from a net you need to give them access to other interventions and I'm guessing these are missing for Foxconn workers. Sadly, they're also missing for a bunch of people in different countries.
At the same time, when people commit suicide at their workplace, it's often a message. If the suicide rate at the workplace is high enough that you need to install safety nets, it may be viable as an emergency measure, but it's a symptom of what should be considered a complete failure of management. Of course, if you consider your employees as cogs in the machine, it's only expected. Once you squeeze an orange sufficiently, no more juice comes out and you can discard its remains.
My understanding is that the only reason these jobs aren't automated already is because labor is cheaper. Unfortunately I think the alternative to a terrible job like working for Foxconn is no job at all for a lot of folks.
Another alternative is USA companies paying closer to USA minimum wage. If that means more automation instead, that's fine (more efficient production), and the unemployed can use their additional free time to fight their supposedly socialist government to share the wealth.
There's probably some stickiness and deception in exploitative workplaces. From the outside they may seem better ("Make $X per hour! Guaranteed hours!"), but once you quit your existing job, move away from home, and work at the factory long enough to realize you were happier before, you may have lost the opportunity to go back to your old life -- your job may be gone, the cost of moving may be too high, you may not be able to take the reputation hit for returning home a failure.
But yeah, you are correct. There are many shitty, hazardous, dangerous, health-destroying, depressing jobs paying next to nothing out there, where it is a rational decision for many people to work there, their best option. And if the companies involved had to make the jobs not suck, they'd probably be better off automating away most of the jobs. Or more realistically, moving to a country which was willing to let the shitty jobs persist, because hey, jobs.
But "better than subsistence farming" shouldn't be the bar we're trying to clear in the 21st century.
Why should we have to choose between low paid, dangerous, uninteresting/soul destroying work or unemployment and poverty?
The question about automation, for me, is one of how we can more sensibly organise the necessary work so that we can each share both the labour and its products?
I dream of a world where I can make machines to save work, and know I'm not putting somebody out of a job they need to feed themselves, but reducing the workload for the whole of society, giving us more free time (or more stuff).
"I shall hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and quibble on HN after Dinner" Marl Karx
And yet, if they made a cheaper iPhone, I'd probably buy it without much thought about how it was made. Oh technology, thy double-edged sword of irony.
Foxconn is poor quality compared to (what's left of) USA labor, and that is a fair point to address, but Foxconn is not poor compared to Chinese economy.
While I understand the point that you're trying to make, I think that characterizing suicide this way is unhelpful. It ignores the fact that most of the people who end up committing suicide are deeply sick, and does nothing but make these ill people feel further disconnected from society.
Suicide and depression are incredibly complex issues, and these kind of oversimplifications don't help anyone.
People who take their lives do it because they feel like that is the only thing they still have control over. You can't even put yourself in that mindset even if you truly wanted, which makes it a little strange to make such a statement about suicide.
Was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi a selfish and cowardly act?
Is it cowardly and selfish to continue using these products? Do you have any kind of exit strategy or utopian vision where everyone, even Foxconn workers can afford a fashionable new iPhone?
In 100 years, we've gone from using slaves for labor to using machines built by wage slaves for labor, mostly because using slaves for labor makes us feel too guilty. Many would call that selfish and cowardly.
I don't endorse suicide, but I don't think it helps anyone to reduce a complex and heartbreaking situation like this into a simple othering.
Making such generalisations is dangerous; for example, suicide when one is terminally ill and in terrible pain could be seen by many as the sensible thing to do.
Yes I agree there may be times where suicide seems preferable to life in the cases you mentioned.
My issue is with this article As far as I can tell this man wasn't definitely depressed. It seems he was just unhappy with his situation and chose to take the easy way out.
There are others who have committed suicide at that factory but of course they aren't poets...
Since he took the rather bold step of actually ending his own life I would think that his outlook on life was sufficiently bleak to warrant at more empathy than that.
Regardless of if he was clinically depressed or just very unhappy, are both not tragic?
Please re-read his words and decide again if his plight was shallow-hearted.
"...Every time I open the window or the wicker gate
This article made me quite sad, despite the great poetry.