Factory jobs pay more than double the average wage in all developing countries. They are demanded by workers and much anguish is caused when they are lost.
This should be mentioned more often. Furthermore, people criticize companies like Foxconn for things like employee suicides, when the suicide rate at Foxconn is actually lower than the suicide rate of China as a whole.
Do you have a source for this? I remember looking into it a while ago and the only consistent statement was that suicide rates at Foxconn were lower than those of OECD countries, not China itself.
I ask because saying that the suicide rate is lower at Foxconn than in China as a whole is a much more convincing argument and I would like to be able to use it confidently in the future!
Foxconn has ~1 million workers http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. Or 17/5 = 3.4 per year per million people. You can play with the numbers several ways but it works out to less than 5% the suicide rate for China. Not that everyone is going to suicide at work, but having a job is probably cuts down the rate by a lot.
