Another employee at iPhone maker Foxconn has jumped to their death. This is the 11th suicide or death at the Company in 12 months.
Chinese media reports say that 21-year-old Nan Gang leapt from a four-storey factory in the early hours, soon after finishing work.
A total of 11 Foxconn employees have tried to kill themselves this year – two have survived.
The incidents have raised concerns about worker treatment at the site. The Associated Press quoted spokesman Arthur Huang as saying the company carried out social responsibility programmes to ensure workers’ welfare.
Earlier this week, Foxconn said it was enlisting counsellors and Buddhist monks to provide emotional support for its workers.
Ten of the employees worked at Foxconn’s campuses in Shenzhen, but on Friday it was revealed that a man who died at a factory in the northern Hebei province had also jumped from a building.
Foxconn is part of Hon Hai Precision, the world’s largest maker of consumer electronics, and employs 800,000 workers worldwide, mostly in China.
The company has said it is taking the deaths seriously, even though a local government investigation did not blame working conditions. The spate of deaths comes after a Foxconn employee in charge of shipping Apple’s iPhone prototype units killed himself last year after one of the units went missing.
Apple said it had investigated accusations of bad employment practices by Foxconn stemming from a June 2006 complaint, and found the claims to be largely unfounded.
However, it concluded that some employees were working more than Foxconn’s mandated maximum during peak production times, and as many as a quarter of them were not taking at least one day off a week.
US-based China Labour Watch has criticised Foxconn’s “military-style administration and harsh working conditions” and called on the company to “initiate a thoroughgoing analysis of life on its production lines”.
