With the first 10,000 robots going into the factories this month Mr. Gou has to learn from the GM tragedies.
Go ahead and laugh.
In 2010 when 18 Foxconn employees attempted suicide and 14 succeeded there was a worldwide outcry.
This outcry stemmed from a number of factors including an ignorance of statistics and a profound ignorance of suicide in human populations.
At the time Foxconn had 930,000 employees (now 1.2mil.) resulting in a suicide rate of 0.001505376% or 1.505 per 100,000.* According to the all-knowing one, Wikipedia, the rate for China as a whole was 22.23 per 100,000.
The Foxconn rate was lower than that of 99 countries including every country in Europe, the U.S. (12.0) and the rest of the G20.
As a general rule, if you aren't feeling too chipper stay out of Eastern Europe and the Western U.S.
*Half of the workforce is in the gigantic Shenzhen complex of facilities. 14/450,000 only gets you to 3.1 per 100,000 or about the rate of Malta and less than a third of the worldwide rate of 10.07 per 100K.
