Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking.
Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.
Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263
I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.
Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260
As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”
In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.
The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.
In the article, the authors used data from the 2011-2015 American Community 5-Year Estimates by the U.S. Census, 2010 U.S Census, and George C. Galster, “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications.”. They looked at data follwing children under 18, and followed poverty trends such as census tracts for concentrated areas of high poverty. They used the number of children in Essex County Cities and compared it to the the amount of children in poverty in those cities, for the years of 2000 and 2015. Henceforth, they created an arguement stating that Child Poverty rates have risen within those 15 years, and even by 50% in some areas. The only issue I have with some of this data is that in some cities, we see a decrease in child population - and while there is an increase in child poverty in those areas, I feel like the reduced number of children in that area plays a big part in the so called "Increased Child Poverty Rates".
The main argument in this artical is children poverty in newark has increased by 19 percent in the last 15 years. In newark over 40% of chlidren live in poverty.