It has been three years running, that a small number of those working at Foxconn have committed suicide for various reasons from 2010 onwards, and the latest suicide at a Foxconn plant would extend this unwanted run to four years. In fact, it was reported that a couple of staff suicide attempts happened in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant in central China’s Henan province, all within the space of four days.
Both factory workers (one male and the other, female) attempted to snuff out their respective lives by leaping from the building that they were working in between April 24 and April 27. The man is no longer alive, while the woman’s fate remains unknown. It seems that whispers from the inside claim that the Zhengzhou factory has entered “silent mode” from the beginning of April, where workers cannot talk about anything that has nothing to do with work while on company premises, although one does wonder who enforces such a draconian rule. Still, offenders were said to get a lower pay, or worse off, fired. Humans aren’t machines and should not be imposed to work under such rules if the reports are true, and it does seem to be more of a working environment for robots than anything else.