It would be a national alarm because this number is very high for our nation
Eighteen was just using the number in the article. A national alarm would be sounded if 3 workers jumped to their death at a GM plant last year. GM executives would be tripping over themselves to show remorse, there would be a 60 Minutes specials on the reason GM drove the employees to their deaths, psychologists would be called in to help workers, etc., etc., etc.
The point is that people would be alarmed, as they should be. People wouldn't be making excuses that suicide happens, deal with it.
Eighteen suicides sounds awfully high, but if it's lower than the average it's actually progress.
Again, we don't know the suicide rate of employees Foxconn. We know the number of people who have jumped to their death. You can't extrapolate a subset of the suicides and compare that to the national average for all suicides.
People probably would be irrationally alarmed. People are also irrationally alarmed when one pretty blond girl vanishes, or when a moron tries to set his underwear on fire on a plane. 60 minutes does devote undue attention to such things, and Obama would probably say "something must be done".
People are more irrational about some topics than others. So what?
Yes, it is irrational to worry about a suicides rate of a subset of people which is not statistically different than the suicide rate of the nation as a whole. You'll note that I'm not applying any double standard to China - I made the exact same argument two years ago about France Telecom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872813
You did not respond to his point that the suicide rate of people who jumped to their deaths is unlikely to represent the entire number of suicides. I tend to agree with him.
Given that someone is posting an infographic here that appears to tacitly claim that the few workers who jumped represent the entire list of suicides at Foxconn, you'll forgive me if I want to examine the data sources and know exactly how the reporting mechanisms work.
Because when I see how anomalously low it is compared to the suicide rate pretty much everywhere else, exactly one thing springs to mind: under-reporting.
I was merely responding to his point about 3 hypothetical suicides at GM, not defending Foxconn against all charges. If you have better data on the suicide rate at Foxconn, go ahead and post it.
Fair enough, but I sincerely doubt that anyone has accurate information on the suicide rate at Foxconn. I just can't believe in anomalously low statistics compared to everywhere else given with no data on how the information was collected.
I work in the game industry. It is, traditionally, a higher stress environment than other jobs. If someone can't take the stress of the job, is it the fault of the industry, the company, or the mental processes of the person in question?
I won't say that the company has no blame, but fobbing off 100% of the responsibility for suicide onto the company is faulty logic at best. When you're considering committing suicide, there's definitely an issue, and more than some of it may be in the way you process stress and/or your environment.
> You can't extrapolate a subset of the suicides and compare that to the national average for all suicides.
No, but you can't meaningfully compare suicide rates between socio-economic climates either. I mean, you can look at the numbers and say "each death is sad, I wish both were lower", but that's about it. Achieving that goal is something you have to do in context. Mandating that a wildly different culture meet your culture's definition of ... anything is a very dangerous game.
Eighteen was just using the number in the article. A national alarm would be sounded if 3 workers jumped to their death at a GM plant last year. GM executives would be tripping over themselves to show remorse, there would be a 60 Minutes specials on the reason GM drove the employees to their deaths, psychologists would be called in to help workers, etc., etc., etc.
The point is that people would be alarmed, as they should be. People wouldn't be making excuses that suicide happens, deal with it.
Eighteen suicides sounds awfully high, but if it's lower than the average it's actually progress.
Again, we don't know the suicide rate of employees Foxconn. We know the number of people who have jumped to their death. You can't extrapolate a subset of the suicides and compare that to the national average for all suicides.