Coincidence?

A few months ago, I wrote about the spate of suicides that occurred amongst employees of France Telecom. Since 2008, 46 France Telecom employees have committed suicide, following a downsizing programme that resulted in the loss of 20,000 jobs. The situation is complex and investigations – in both Paris and Besançon, in eastern France – are ongoing, so we can't draw any definitive conclusions. However, an apparently similar situation has come to light in Longhua, China, at the Foxconn electronics construction factory. So far, around a dozen workers at the factory – reports vary, making exact numbers difficult to rely on – have killed themselves this year. In response, Foxconn have increased salaries, brought in Buddhist monks and installed 1.5m square meters of safety netting.

Context is everything: the Foxconn factory employs nearly half a million workers and the number of suicides is not – in statistical terms – remarkable; suicides tend to happen in clusters and the average suicide rate in China is around 13 per 100,000 people. It is true that some workers at the plant have blamed a culture of bullying and harassment from managers but others have dismissed that idea. No one knows for sure what is causing the suicides but Foxconn is interesting, not just in the light of the France Telecom case but also because it constructs some of the worlds most in-demand consumer electronics. If you’re reading this on an iPhone or an iPad, the chances are it was built in the Foxconn factory in question.

As yet, there are no answers from either case and we may never know what caused the suicides – each of the 60 people who chose to end their lives may have done so for entirely separate and unconnected reasons. Each one is an individual tragedy and deserves both our sympathy and empathy. But this is the second time, since the beginning of the financial crisis, that two such suicide clusters have come to light within two separate employers. Is the financial crisis, with its attendant increase of pressure on employees, in some way connected to this? As the saying goes, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence…” For Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, three times meant enemy action; we’ll have to watch for a third cluster before we can judge whether there is something here about which we, as a wider society, need to worry.