Foxconn to shutter China factories | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn to shutter China factories

theregister.co.uk

19 pointschris2416 comments

Unbelievably bizarre that high profile news of suicides at a rate smaller then the demographic norm in China results in the loss of 800,000 jobs.

That's what we call a powerful meme :)

This news is almost certainly false.

A sign of great reporting:

  This news comes by way of the Chinese-language news site
  ON.CC — a Google translation is available here — and 
  couldn't immediately be independently verified.

Yes, that is actually a sign of good reporting. Most news sites would not tell you that they had not verified this message, they would just publish it as truth. It also may indicate that they tried to verify it.

Of course, they could have decided to hold onto the story, until it was verified, but in the online world, news travels fast.

I honestly don't blame them. They either have the choice to increase costs by 30% because of media pressure or decrease costs and media attention by moving to a cheaper country where people aren't as prone to jumping off of roofs.

Not asking this to be sarcastic: what cheaper country? I can't immediately come up with any industrialized nations capable of supporting large-scale electronics manufacturing that would have lower wages than China.

According to the article, they're considering Taiwan, Vietnam, and India.

Taiwan has a ton of electronics manufacturing, and Vietnam and India both have industrialized coastal towns.

I doubt the story. BTW, I was flying back from a work day in San Jose last Friday, and the fellow sitting next to me on the airplane mentioned both that his company makes iPad parts and that they have had problems with suicides in their China factories. Probably the same company?

Doesn't make sense. Announce a 30% raise in wages, then a week later announce that everyone is fired?

Makes a ton on sense.

Announce the wage increase because you are forced to. Then realize that you are no longer competitive and are loosing business. Now your only choice is to lay people off.

What doesn't make sense is the incredibly huge task of moving all that work to somewhere else, as well as leaving an area that you have setup to handle such a huge amount of work.

If this is true, it is just in the planning stages for years down the track, or they have been planning this for a long time.

hmm, I see that they have suspended their death benefit to discourage suicide. maybe death benefits shouldn't cover suicide at all

See here: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2746/would-life-ins...

Basically they don't for the first two years, then they do (for life insurance anyway).

My thoughts exactly. Why not keep the benefits which are good but add a clause for suicides. Maybe that is what happened but it got mis-reported by the media.

That would probably wind up with some pretty horrific situations. It's not always clear if a death was a suicide. Combine ambiguity with LARGE sums of money...

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