Working at FoxConn appears to lower suicide risk | Hacker News Reader

Working at FoxConn appears to lower suicide risk

zdnet.com

36 pointsfrankus9 comments

As far as I know the number of suicides doesn’t include workers who decided to kill themselves at home, not at the plant.

Even though the numbers certainly don’t seem extraordinary if you put them in context. It would be a interesting social science research project to figure out how to get comparable data and which comparisons are useful.

From what I read, the plant is practically a self-contained city; most of the workers actually live at the plant.

Obviously that's something that's really hard to adjust for, living at your place of work, but the best start would be to identify if all the people who committed suicide at the plant, also lived at the plant

(I may be grossly incorrect here; I'm about to doze off, and my memory sucks most of the time anyway. If I'm wrong, my apologies.)

Were all 10 of these suicides from FoxConn's Shenzhen plant (population 330,000)?

If so, perhaps a fair basis of comparison would be the suicide rate at other manufacturing plants, along with the general suicide rate for working employees.

I imagine anyone with work and employment is less likely to commit suicide than the general population (though I haven't seen the statistics). The question is, is working at FoxConn more stressful than other comparable employers?

Moreover, the recent suicides at FoxConn simply reflect that suicide risk is highest in the Northern Hemisphere in the month of May.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4528883.stm

Might there be some confounding factors. Perhaps having a stable job at a factory, even if it's FoxConn, is better morale than being a perpetually marginalized migrant worker that's tossed from abusive employer to abusive employer since you left your family in the countryside to find your fortune, despite lacking credentials, in beautiful Shanghai?

Actually the few I met seemed surprisingly chipper. That must not be it.

Here's the original blog at the People's Daily Online: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90780/91345/6994665.html

And yes, that's the official news paper of the Chinese Communist Party by way of ZDnet. Not that there's anything wrong with that...iPhone white compliments my Little Red Book.

Fake Steve has good insight.

http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/05/our-new-spin-on-the-foxconn...

>Working at Foxconn dramatically reduces people’s risk of suicide!

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/552/

only one problem..

China suicide rate per 100,000 people base don 100,000 people that are not transient..

That 400,00 foxcon employee number changes monthly..ie its not the same 400,000 people and thus you cannot statistically compare the stats to one another

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