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Foxconn, the Chinese maker of parts for companies like Apple, Amazon, Sony, Dell and Dow Jones components Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, is once again back in the news, and it's deja vu all over again.
Almost a year ago, Minyanville's Justin Rohrlich took a look at the
controversial working conditions at Foxconn's mammoth factory in Shenzhen, a city in southern China. So bad were the conditions that 32 employees attempted suicide in 2010, with 14 of them succeeding. In response, Foxconn raised wages by one-third to 1,200 yuan and even established an in-house counseling service.
However, it seems like either things have not improved much at the electronics-making behemoth or workers at the firm have learnt that threatening suicide is a sure-fire way to get what they want because some 150 workers at Foxconn's plant in Wuhan, southern China threatened to stage a mass suicide on Jan. 3 in protest over a plan to move workers from one unit to another in the Wuhan campus.
The latest in a series of long-running labor disputes arose after Foxconn announced last week that it would shut down the production line for Microsoft's Xbox 360 consoles at the Wuhan campus and transfer workers affected to another job.