Just to reiterate a point that has already been made a lot of times over the past couple of years: the workers at Foxconn committed suicide at a rate significantly lower than that of the general population in China. And those suicide rates are the official Chinese ones, which if anything would probably be understated with regard to suicide in the general populace, because they certainly do not want to look bad.
(Unfortunately, we do not have numbers for China broken down by age. So it may well be that Foxconn's suicides *were* out of the ordinary, for people of that age. However, since we don't know, it seems somewhat irresponsible to assume that that is the case.)
If a company in the US had, say, 50,000 employees, and those employees committed suicide at 2/3 the rate that other people in the US commit suicide, would we hold a Spanish inquisition?
This is not to say that Foxconn is a great place to work, or that there aren't real problems. All I'm saying is, using this as evidence that there are real problems is either slightly ignorant or extremely disingenuous.
People are jumping out of the windows at Ford factories? How about the night shift workers at ghetto mini-marts? Not them either?
There is a big difference between unhappy people who kill themselves in random locations, and those who specifically kill themselves at work by jumping out of the building they work in! They are trying to make a point obviously.
It is ignorant or (that big word) to think otherwise.