beyondbrics

It’s a new year, but for Foxconn, the old problems seem to be coming back all over again. It turns out that early last week, at least 150 workers at the Taiwanese group’s factory in the Central Chinese city of Wuhan threatened collective suicide in a pay dispute gone wrong.

After a Chinese internet post with pictures was picked up by Taiwanese media and then by Western blogs this week, Foxconn hurried to say late Wednesday that the dispute had been settled “peacefully” the same day, and Microsoft, one of the companies whose products are manufactured at the Wuhan plant, said it was looking into working conditions there.

And just like that, Foxconn is again linked with the attributes of a ‘military-style’ management which has young people working endless shifts under poor conditions that eventually drive them into suicide.

That is a worrying development for the company which has been trying hard to shake off the image of a sweatshop and adjust its production management after 18 Foxconn workers tried to end their lives, and 14 of them actually died in 2010.

Such clusters have appeared in other organizations and countries before, including the National Health System and France Telecom, and psychologists say such suicides cannot simply be attributed to working conditions.

And yet the monotonous nature of the work in Foxconn’s factories and the high turnover rates were among the reasons that caused some young workers to feel helpless, lonely and disoriented, and thus raised suicide risks.

Foxconn realized that and tried to respond: It set up a range of counselling systems and drastically raised wages especially for those willing to stay longer in order to lower turnover rates. The company also stepped up the pace of building factories in China’s hinterland, in the provinces where most of the migrant workers come from.

There have been a few further reports about Foxconn workers committing suicide over the past year, but the numbers have been far below the national suicide rate and no more than known from other companies.

Foxconn’s latest problem seems to be a different one. The workers in Wuhan tried to force the company to agree to a wage raise by threatening to jump off a building. Only lengthy negotiations with intervention by the city’s mayor could resolve the crisis.

Workers who took part in the incident said they took the drastic step because the company denied them a pay raise it had promised earlier when transferring them to Wuhan from another plant.

Some workers in Foxconn’s factory in the Eastern city of Yantai also complained on Thursday about the terms of their transfer from another plant in the Central city of Zhengzhou, including delayed New Year holidays.

While the company has made a lot of changes, it will have to make more. Young workers in China are obviously in high demand, are they are no longer remaining silent.

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