Foxconn has received a lot of negative press in the past few weeks owing to a spate of employee suicides. The suicides were blamed on the bad working conditions which led Foxconn to announce a substantial pay-hike to its employees last week.
But are these suicides actually homicides? A blogger who claims to be a Foxconn employee has now revealed that at least some of the “suicides” were actually homicides caused by the Foxconn security team.
The first time Foxconn was in the news to a related incident was when a Foxconn employee committed suicide after he lost an iPhone prototype. Back then, one of his friends had posted,
“Strongly condemn Foxconn’s security chief Zou Qinming. Sadly mourning our fellow student Sun Dangyong. They used illegal methods of assault, search, and detention to torture Sun Dangyong, causing him to choose to end his life. This is all caused by that group inside Foxconn; they hold undeniable responsibility.”
The recent spate of suicides too seem to have a similar pattern. Another Foxconn employee who claims to work in the logistics department says that these employees were actually beaten and insulted by the security department. The employee calls upon Security Department head Chinming Gu and his subordinate, Feng Liu as people without “any humanity”.
According to this employee, the ninth death on May 14 could not have been a suicide. He writes,
“A suicide victim could not have stabbed himself four times, then jumped off the roof, then flipped over the fence.”
These latest revelations are sure to open a whole new can of worms with respect to Foxconn’s working conditions and more importantly put pressure on MNCs like Apple to rethink their partnership with the manufacturer.
[via Epoch Times]