Posts written by Maxine Pfannkuch (2)

Over the last few years, Chinese manufacturer Foxconn has attracted attention from the international media for a spate of suicides in its factories. Foxconn makes products for Apple, including the iPhone and iPad, and manufactures for Sony, Zoostorm, Dell, and Nokia. It employs 1.2 million people in China, with its factory in Shenzhen employing 300,000 people alone.

Articles such as “Another Foxconn worker commits suicide” (NZ Herald 21 July 2011) blame working conditions and long hours of work for the number of suicides. Last year, 14 Foxconn employees committed suicide – most jumped to their deaths – resulting in the company installing netting around the factory and dormitory buildings.

Undoubtedly the working conditions are tough at Foxconn, but what do we make of this suicide rate? Is the suicide rate at Foxconn a lot higher than the suicide rate in the whole population? You’d think so, from all the media attention.

What is the suicide rate in China? It’s actually quite difficult to get a sense of the actual rate, as official figures and independent sources vary wildly from 6.6 to 30.3 per 100,000 per year. (Jing Jun, 2008, Samuel Law and Pozi Liu, 2008) For comparison, New Zealand’s suicide rate is roughly 13 suicides per 100,000 people per year (WHO, 1999, Ministry of Health, 2005).

Even if we take the lowest reported rate of 6.6 per 100,000 people per year, the Foxconn suicide rate among its mammoth workforce of 1.2 million is well below this rate. Taking a conservative view, if the 14 suicides in 2010 occurred amongst Foxconn’s 300,000 workers in Shenzhen, the rate works out to 4.7 per 100,000 people per year.

Another factor that could be at play is age. The people working at Foxconn would be young, say in the 25-34 year old group, and we know that this age group in New Zealand has a higher suicide rate than others. Surprisingly, this does not appear to be the case in China, where elderly people tend to have a higher suicide rate. (Jing Jun, 2008, WHO, 1999)

While each Foxconn suicide is a tragedy, with such a large workforce 14 suicides in 2010 is neither unexpected nor unusual. If anything, Foxconn’s workers have a lower suicide rate than could be expected, on average, amongst their peers.

The newspaper reports infer that there is a link between suicides and working conditions, and that the number of suicides is unusual.

Suicide rate per 100,000 people per year: China nationally 6.6, Foxconn Shenzhen 4.7

Disclaimer: There are many complex cultural and sociological factors at work, as well as pressures that inflate or deflate reported data from China.

“Shocking world of our student drunks” shouted the 10 June front page headline from the New Zealand Herald.

“Nearly a third of university drinkers have passed out while boozing in the past six months”, it continued. Moreover, “27 percent of men and 9 percent of women say throwing up will not stop their boozing.”

And where did all that come from?

The figures came from a survey of students at just three student dormitories at a single university, and could therefore be symptomatic of a very localised culture, but were presented as picture of student behaviour across an entire country.

The authors of the source paper in the New Zealand Medical Journal carefully reported that their research population was “three student residential facilities in 2006”. In addition to their place of residence these students were very unrepresentative of the student body as a whole in terms of age and sex.

Most percentages quoted were related only to drinkers but sound in the news report as if they were percentages of all students.

Also 40% of those contacted did not take part. Ignoring nonresponse biases the male figures have an unacknowledged margin of error of the order of 7%.

So what is our point?

An implied applicability of the results that goes far beyond what is justified from the research undertaken and oversensationalising to make an attention grabbing story.