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