Foxconn, located on the coast of China, is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. They make iPhones, Wiis, and many other famous products. You may have read about the epidemic of suicide that has broken out among its employees. There were two in the last few days, for example. The count now stands at something like a dozen suicides in about a month. The factory complex involved is gigantic, with perhaps 300,000 workers, but no question this is a terrible thing. The victims are all or mostly men in their early twenties. The median length of employment at Foxconn might be about a year.
Foxconn has appealed to my university (Tsinghua) and in particular my department (Psychology) for help. I’m told their assembly line was designed at Tsinghua. In any case, several people from my department (faculty and graduate students) have gone to the factory and tried to do something.
At a department meeting we discussed our department’s involvement. I said it’s really hard to make progress on such problems for reasons that might not be obvious. When I had trouble waking up too early, I started to study the problem via self-experimentation. All I cared about was solving the problem. Any answer was acceptable. I would spend as long as it took to find it. It took me 10 years to make visible progress. The first thing I figured out was that the problem was partly due to eating breakfast — which sleep researchers had failed to discover.
Consider the Foxconn suicides. It would be incredibly helpful to figure out what’s causing them. But few professors want to study a problem that they have no idea if they can solve nor how long it will take. They don’t want to wait ten years to write a paper. By then their funding will have run out. If funding is assured regardless of progress, then how does the funder ensure they are actually doing something? And few professors have total academic freedom. Their graduate school advisor, their academic friends, the people who control their career have certain beliefs. About which theories are good and which are bad. About which methods are “correct”. If their results contradict these beliefs, if they use a “wrong” method, they will suffer, just as all heretics suffer. So there is pressure to come up with an acceptable answer using proper methods. This gets in the way of coming up with the actual answer.
This doesn’t mean academic research is useless, but it does mean that professors work in shackles that outsiders are, in my experience, unaware of. I wrote about this in my Medical Hypotheses paper. It is a big reason my self-experimentation found new and surprising answers to old questions: I had total freedom. All I cared about was finding the answer. I didn’t care about publications. I didn’t worry about funding. I had as much time as it took.
Seth, this story is getting coverage here in Korea. I hope that there are changes that can be made. Awareness of the problem and not trying to cover up the issue may be a good start.
Note, the US military faced similar concerns with suicides by members returning from the early deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. A program designed to raise awareness of the issue was the response…not sure of its effectiveness. Also, there was/is a concern that the suicide rate may be higher than reported, as some may be reported as motorcycle and auto accidents.
Q: Is there a higher than expected accidental death rate at Foxconn?
I’ve read about the incidents. A lot of people of the far east are frustrated by the entire economic model. Indeed, they produce the entire product but make little money compared to Apple, Microsoft, Dell, etc… Marketing and design is where the vast majority of the profit is made.
Still, that doesn’t really explain the higher suicide rate.
Considering that thousands of Chinese coal miners die each year and that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Chinese have their lives shortened by lack of safety and environmental regulations, 13 suicides among a population of 300,000 of mostly young males suggests that preventing suicide is more high-status than preventing other forms of morbidity and mortality.
Vic, my guess is that the owner of Foxconn feels embarrassed by what has happened. Due to the publicity of course. Whether journalists think it is higher status to cover Foxconn than a coal mine I don’t know. Manufacturing is a much larger business in China than mining, so in some sense manufacturing is a bigger story.
Doesn’t America have a startlingly high suicide rate for students who move off to college and live in a dorm (like Foxconn, where most workers live in dorms)?
Dorm life (moving away from family, friends, and community) can initially be brutal.
Seth
I’m on my final year, hopefully, of my phd. I learned the hard way why you don’t take on a problem like the one you describe. I hate to say it, but it’s really hurt my career. I love to take chances and try to push science in new directions but you can’t as a student or even as an academic unless you have such a reputation and huge research program that it won’t cripple you.
I’m really down on science right now as a result of these sorts of issues
This is not a problem. 12 out of 330,000 in 5 months. See the Wikipedia page on national suicide rates. Do the math.
Half of these are probably copycat suicides which will fade out when the publicity dies.
One thing Foxconn could do is not pay 6-10 years of “suicide compensation” to families. Foxconn has no obligation to them.