Working Conditions In China Leading To Suicides

If you think that you have a long, busy work week consider what a typical worker in China has to go through. It is not uncommon in that nation for a worker in a factory to be on the job for 18 hours a day seven days a week. There is no union activity allowed, no benefits offered, and they are paid well under $200 dollars a month and they can be fired at any whim by their employer with no legal recourse. In some cases wages are as low as 9 cents an hour in some factories. It can be enough to drive some Chinese employees to commit suicide. Consider a company called Foxxconn. It is a factory that employs over 300,000 people. They assemble products for American companies that do not want to hire and employ American workers in order to save money on labor costs and thereby increase their profit margins. Foxxconn factory puts together products like The I-Phone for Apple. They also assemble computers for Dell. On May 25th they suffered their ninth suicide of the year by an employee when a worker jumped out of a window rather than go back to work to do another grueling shift. The company and factory have been singled out and criticized in the past for stressful working conditions but the owner of the company has long denied that he runs a "sweatshop."