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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of righteous, eloquent fury here. I had nearly forgotten about the foxconn suicides, and now that I think about it I don't remember anything really happening except nets being put up.

Louis CK (RIP our opinion of him, but still) put it pretty well once, something along the lines of "slavery built everything we love. We just throw human death and suffering at a thing until it's done. There's no end to what you can do when you don't give a fuck about a certain group of people. You can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to eachother, or you can leverage the endless suffering of someone really far away so you can leave a mean comment on someone's youtube video while you take a shit."

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Apparently (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides), the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.

> the suicide rate at Foxconn during that period was lower than the overall Chinese or US suicide rate.

Please allow me to change your opinion on this. The comparison being made there is the ( number of suicides at Foxconn / number of Foxconn employees ) vs number of suicides in China / population of China. At first glance, this looks like a valid comparison. But it is not. It is actually comparing apples to oranges. The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees. A useful way to paraphrase this is:

Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year? Not how many google employees commit suicide overall.

When phrased this way, it becomes clear that other companies have much lower suicide rates than Foxconn.

That's what is critical to compare. It turns out Foxconn's suicide rate is massively higher than equivalent Chinese employers and the inference is the alleged egregious mistreatment of Foxconn laborers by Foxconn is the cause.

Why do you think the Foxconn suicide figures don't include all suicide attempts by employees?

Note that one of the attempts catalogued on Wikipedia states that one Mr. 刘 "threw himself from the sixth floor of a dormitory building". That would tend to imply that the statistics cover the workers while they're on or off the job -- the statistics are for suicide attempts on campus, but the employees live on campus.

And that would tend to imply that the appropriate comparison is indeed "how many people commit suicide anywhere?", not "how many people commit suicide in the office?".

Its much simpler actually.

If you have a bunch of companies trying to keep their shit together while barely able to make their product and then someone kills himself simple because the situation is no longer worth living - then it is a sad thing.

If the product is one of the most successful things in human history the suicide is a design goal.

If we don't stand up to it and at least voice our objection we will all be treated like that eventually - regardless of corporate success or personal productivity.

The only other role is that of the psychopath pressuring those who do the work in order to meet the suicide quota. If you don't meet the suicide quota your workers are not working hard enough or you are paying them to much. It's simple business logic nothing personal.

This contains a common logical error in most of the poor-people-suffer-to-serve-us-rich-people arguments. That is to ignore anyone whose suffering has no causal link from us. For example, an isolated tribesman may die from an easily treatable disease because he has no medicine and we don't blame rich people for that. But if he moves to town to earn money for medicine and then dies in a construction site accident, we blame ourselves for causing the construction site to exist. We forget that he may have been in greater danger or suffering more before getting involved with us.

It applies to low wages for illegal immigrants too. Once they're in our country, we feel responsible for them. Before they got here, we don't care at all how little they earn. Some people even go so far as to want to kick them out to save them from earning low wages. Really it just saves us the guilt but makes it worse for the individual.

Someone quits or is fired and within a week commits suicide. Not counted. If that's the case, it is another reason it isn't fair to compare with national numbers.

And if someone lives on corporate campus but commits suicide off of a bridge in town, not counted?

>The real comparison is against number of employees who choose to commit suicide at their employers premise / number of employees.

A very large proportion of Chinese factory workers (including a majority of Foxconn workers) live in company-owned dormitories located on or near the factory site. Most Chinese factory workers are internal migrants from poorer northern and central provinces. These workers generally prefer dormitory accommodation, because it allows them to save a larger proportion of their salary towards their future plans.

You would only be comparing like-with-like if Google provided on-site housing at the Googleplex to a majority of their workers.

>Lets say Google has 100,000 employees. How many Google employees commit suicide at the Googleplex per year?

Google employees don't live at the Googleplex so that's not valid.

If you want to compare them to other companies you would either need to include suicide off campus of the other companies or exclude suicide off-shift at Foxconn.

> slavery built everything we love

Not at all. The repudiation of slavery built everything we love. The Confederacy went to war with the Union to protect its failing economy. Their loss in the Civil War resulted in the utter destruction of the slave economy and what it produced.

The enormous profits from the slave plantations were in part put into the industry that developed in the north, providing lots of the much-needed starting capital. The US wouldn't be where they're at today without the exploitation of slaves.

> The enormous profits from the slave plantations were in part put into the industry that developed in the north

The slave plantations could barely sustain themselves, and they started to war because they wanted to protect their fragile economy from competition.

The free north industrialized and economically buried the slave south. The rebel army didn't even have shoes - they went barefoot. The slave economy couldn't even produce shoes.

Of course there was trade and investment going back and forth between the states, after all, it was one country. But the idea that the wealth of the north depended on "enormous profits" from slavery is just not credible.

There's a reason that slavery died out in the northern states by 1800 or so. It didn't pay. It didn't produce enormous profits. It was an economic loser.

Slavery has failed every time it went up against free labor. It just can't compete.

Apart from actual slavery with chains and guns, often the people suffering are suffering less doing the productive work than they would be otherwise because they do it by choice. So you could equally say "reducing human suffering has brought us all the things we love". Even when people die, they've taken a risk doing the dangerous job instead of whatever else which was worse. Anyone who drives to work is doing that - you could stay home unemployed or risk death in a car crash to make money.

It's an interesting claim that they are suffering less because they are doing it by choice. I'm not sure if it's true.

Doing it by choice creates all sorts of ill psychological effects. It means I have to convince myself to keep doing it, and as a result I'll try to convince myself of things like "it's fair" or "I like this" or so on. I think I might actually be happier as a slave than a wage slave doing the exact same shitty work and ridiculous hours as a slave because at least I can be honest with myself about the situation.

Normally wage slavery is better - because it means that the employers can't enforce quite as shitty conditions or long hours as a actual slave. But it's not clear to me that that is happening here, and even if it is happening here if you understood your argument to rely on it.

“Wage slavery” as it is often used is a bad term that takes away from the fact that there are more total people in slavery or forced labor than ever before in the history of the world. Chattel slavery is repugnant and debases all moral people. Working a shitty job for low pay and an asshole boss sucks but is a difference in kind, not degree.

You literally just stated the opposite of what I was arguing as if it was a fact, with no argument given.

And to be clear, we are well beyond "asshole boss" or anything legal in the western world. We are considering a situation where you are treated identically to a slave except that instead of being forced to work via beatings and supplied food, you are supplied just enough money to eat - buying everything at the company store - and forced to work by "well otherwise you starve to death".

(By food I also include things like shelter and so on...)

> well otherwise you starve to death

That's why such work is a good thing, not a bad thing. It saves people from starving to death. Which is what happens periodically during famines in extremely undeveloped countries, such as most of history.

I presented a different view, not an argument. I stated my view as fact because it is in fact how I see the world. For arguments about chattel slavey and wage Labour, the Wikipedia article does a pretty good job: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

There are people in the world who are functionally chattel slaves who happen to receive a nominal wage, but this is not what the term “wage slavery” typically refers to; that term (and perhaps your argument, though I am not sure) equivocates wage labor with chattel slavery. I and others believe the difference is vast, important, and moral.

Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants. Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.

> Just look at all the beautiful castles and churches in Europe. They were mostly built on the backs of peasants.

That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those.

> Or all the generals we revere who sent thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who had not much to gain from the war to their deaths.

Who exactly? That does not sound representative.

How about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia

That's true in pre-European contact Peru as well. The amazing architecture was produced by skilled craftsman as a community effort. They didn't/couldn't build anything of quality once they were enslaved by the Spanish. (I'm not an expert, but I visited Peru a couple years ago)

"That's not accurate. Skilled workers built those."

The skilled workers did the difficult parts. Getting the materials to the construction site and other (often dangerous) tasks were done either by children or peasants that had either been forced or attracted by false promises. In addition the churches and kings often didn't pay the promised money. Just read some history books. The top guys always wanted to keep as much to themselves as they could. No difference to now. They could be even greedier back then because the little guy had no rights.

I never watched Louis CK, but I managed to dig up a reference for that quote [1]. Regarding Foxconn, @evanpw is right though in that the suicide rates were not significantly different from those in the rest of the country. There is no denying though that a lot of human and non-human suffering has gone – and goes for that matter – into the very things we treasure and admire; one can wonder if this will always be the case?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw&t=2m59s

I must have missed some intersection between pop culture and some political bubble. What happened to our opinion of Louis CK?

Sexual harassment. Self admitted. Ugly stuff.

Like most quotes from comedians that sound smart, he’s totally wrong. Unless you consider all existence is suffering or something or make the definition of suffering so broad as to make the quote pointless.

Just a few examples of great things accomplished without great human suffering or slavery- space race, Internet, Inca Trail, Bilbao Museum.

> space race

This was literally the result of the Cold War.

> Internet

Partially the same as above, also, there's no denying that they're isn't any suffering because of the Internet.

> Inca Trail, Biblao Museum

These mostly came about because of mechanization or better technology…

The quote in question is "slavery built everything we love".

Explain how slavery built the Internet or triggered the space race.

No, the quote is "great things accomplished without great human suffering or slavery".

Yeah, that's just being dramatic too.

A tremendous amount of things in the past were created by skilled artisans, workers, farmers etc.

And in those cases where people had to do difficult work and suffered, that was because there were no other ways of accomplishing that work.

It's not that there was some cabal of evil leaders making life hard for the masses, it's that in order to accomplish things like mining and large scale public works without machines, hard manual labor was necessary.

Of course we could have just not done any of this, but then we would still be hunter gatherers.

Sorry to dissapoint but see below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Slave_labor

"More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon"

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#NASA_career

"American authorities then chose to use von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle. Wernher von Braun had such an idea originally proposed in 1954, but it was denied at the time.[60]"

Not slaves.

The production of the V2 was done by slave labor, but the research and development of it was not. As far as I can tell there were no slaves at Peenemunde.

Soviet Union -> Stalin -> Communist hegemony in Europe -> Space Race

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