A 21-year-old employee of technology giant Foxconn Technology Group (富士康) jumped to his death in southern China, reports said yesterday, the latest in a string of deaths involving its workers.
Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) in Taiwan, is the world’s largest maker of computer components and assembles products for Apple, including the iPhone, Sony and Nokia. The company is in the spotlight after suicides and labor unrest at its massive Chinese plants.
At least 13 employees died in apparent suicides last year, which activists blamed on tough working conditions and led to calls for better treatment of staff.
The latest death was of a man who only started work at the company’s sprawling plant in Shenzhen on June 27. He died on Tuesday, according to the Hong Kong Economic Times, which quoted a Foxconn official.
Police are investigating the fatal incident, the report said.
The company, meanwhile, has tried to contain the damage from the suspected suicide attempt by contending that the employee’s fall was not a result of work pressure.
Foxconn vice president Terry Cheng (程天縱) attributed the death to a possible accident, saying that the employee had only worked two hours of overtime since he joined the company.
“Based on my preliminary understanding, the employee was not a member of staff on the production line, but he worked in our research department,” Cheng told reporters in Taipei on Tuesday. “The employee was still on a training program and he had worked overtime for only two hours during the past 20 days, so we think that work pressure is irrelevant.”
He said that “prior to the accident, the employee had dined with 20 to 30 colleagues and they were likely drunk.”
Suicides have brought to light the high-pressure conditions in Hon Hai’s Chinese factories and they have tarnished the company’s reputation — forcing it to reconsider its management policies and increase wages substantially.
The company employs about 1 million people in China, about half of them based at its main facility in the southern industrial boomtown of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong.
The firm in March reported a net loss of US$218.3 million last year on revenue of US$6.63 billion — about 8 percent lower than in 2009 — adding to mounting woes at the Taipei-based firm over the past few years.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary