【英语社会】自杀事件令富士康遭遇空前拷问

Apple Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other electronics companies said they are examining the response by major supplier Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. to a wave of employee suicides that has drawn unprecedented scrutiny to the Asian manufacturing giant and highlighted the changing nature of China's manufacturing work force.

The tech companies' promises to investigate came before another Hon Hai worker died Wednesday night in an apparent suicide attempt and as the company's hard-charging chairman, Terry Gou, moved to contain the widening fallout from the spate of employee deaths.

Wednesday's incident, reported by state-run Xinhua news agency, marks the tenth time an employee at Hon Hai's sprawling Longhua complex in the southern city of Shenzhen has plunged to their death this year, most since April, with two more injured in failed attempts.

Earlier Wednesday, the normally secretive company gave a tour of Longhua, a walled-off complex with guarded gates and several hundred thousand workers, to a group of journalists, and announced plans to outfit worker dormitories with safety nets to prevent more workers from jumping to their deaths.

'These last two months, I've been afraid to answer the phone late at night or early in the morning, because we've been unable to prevent these incidents from happening,' the 59-year-old Mr. Gou told reporters at the Longhua campus, which has dozens of factory buildings and worker dormitories. He expressed 'regret' over the incidents, but defended Hon Hai's response. 'We need time. But we have confidence and strong determination' to address the problem, he said.

The statements Wednesday from Apple, H-P and others were the first public comment on the suicides by customers of Hon Hai, which also goes by the trade name Foxconn. The Taiwan-based company, which Mr. Gou founded in 1974, is the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer by revenue, assembling iPads and MacBooks for Apple as well as other gadgets and computers for brands like Dell Inc. and Nokia Corp.

'We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,' Apple said, adding it had assigned a team to evaluate Hon Hai's efforts to address the suicides. The Cupertino, Calif., company said it is in contact with Hon Hai's senior management and 'we believe they are taking this matter very seriously.'

H-P, the world's biggest maker of personal computers, said it 'is investigating the Foxconn practices that may be associated with these tragic events.' A Dell spokesman said, 'any reports of poor working conditions in Dell's supply chain are investigated and, if warranted, appropriate action is taken.' Nokia said 'we have contacted Foxconn to ensure any issues are identified and addressed.'

The deaths at Hon Hai have defied simple explanation. The company and its affiliates employ some 820,000 workers throughout China, 450,000 of them at the main Longhua plant and nearby satellite facilities. Given China's overall suicide rate, the deaths aren't statistically exceptional, but the quick succession is unusual. Their pattern resembles what psychologists call a 'suicide cluster,' where one suicide triggers copycat acts -- often in schools or groups of young people.

Amid widening public concern, Chinese government officials have said they are looking into the deaths at Hon Hai. But so far authorities have suggested no wrongdoing by the company.

Labor rights activists say the deaths demonstrate problems with the way Hon Hai treats its staff. Workers are paid a base salary of 900 yuan a month, or about $132, the legal minimum wage, but most work overtime, which can pay 1.5 times or more the standard hourly rate. Critics say Hon Hai compels or allows employees to work more than the legal number of overtime hours, and that its military-style rigor and repetitive working conditions create excessive stress on workers.

Still, the labor activists say Hon Hai's conditions are better than those at many factories in China, and that conditions have been improving in recent years.

Hon Hai says its compensation and overtime practices follow local labor laws and the guidelines of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, a group that promotes a code of conduct for international supply chains. The company has launched a series of antisuicide measures, from establishing a suicide hotline to hiring academic experts and counselors to inviting a group of Buddhist monks to pray for the factory.

Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, a New York-based group, says another problem is that Hon Hai's Longhua plant has simply become too large. 'These young workers feel like there's no one caring for them,' he says. Hon Hai's methods have failed to keep up with changes among the migrant workers who staff coastal factories like Longhua, he says.

Mr. Li and other Chinese scholars and labor experts say workers from earlier generations, who hailed mainly from poor farms in China's hinterland, were accustomed to hard farm work and more single-mindedly focused on making money. Today's young workers are less firmly rooted and more aware of the chasm that separates their own arduous lives from the wealth and comfort of others in Chinese society.

'The migrant workers of this generation are so different from earlier generations,' says Li Guorui, a psychology professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. ''Modern migrant workers live in an age where it easy to get information through mobile phones, the media and the Internet. It is easy for them to know the lives of youths of the same age.' Today's workers, he says, 'don't want to be a money-making machine.'

After 19-year-old Li Hai jumped to his death Tuesday from a fifth-floor window of a training center, police found a suicide note apologizing to his family. The note indicated that Mr. Li had 'lost confidence in his future,' and that 'his expectations of what he could do at work and for his family far outweighed what could be achieved,' the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing police.

While labor activists refer to Longhua as a sweatshop, it hardly has the look of Dickensian squalor the term connotes. On Wednesday, thousands of workers walked the tree-lined streets in colored uniforms bearing identification badges, while others ate in canteens boasting different regional cuisines.

The factory has a hospital and a bookstore amid the countless, squat factory buildings. A banner advertised a company karaoke contest. Liu Risheng, a 22-year-old employee who stood outside a cafeteria smoking a cigarette, said the pressure was manageable. 'People complain from time to time,' he said, but 'it doesn't affect me much.'

Hon Hai's culture is built around the personality of Mr. Gou, who started making television channel-changing knobs with a loan from his mother and built Hon Hai into a titan with more than $60 billion in revenue last year. Mr. Gou combines intense drive with a martial leadership style. In a rare interview in 2007 with The Wall Street Journal, he described Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian conqueror, as a personal hero, and said 'I hate that I [have] become famous.'

Hon Hai's missteps have worsened the bad publicity triggered by the suicide wave. Mr. Gou's announcement Wednesday that the company will install 1.5 million square meters of netting around its buildings in the next several weeks was ridiculed as a sign that it expects more jumpers. And the chairman was forced to publicly withdraw a letter to employees about the suicides the night before that was seen by some as insensitive.

Apple has been snared in controversy over Hon Hai before. Media reports of poor treatment of Longhua workers in 2006 prompted it to send a team to investigate. It found a handful of violations of its Supplier Code of Conduct, including workers exceeding its recommended 60-hour week, but said overall Hon Hai complied with its guidelines 'in the majority of areas.' Apple continues to inspect the plant regularly, as it does other suppliers.

Such audits generally involve visual checks of the facilities and interviews with employees that companies say are designed to keep them free from management intimidation. It would be extremely difficult for companies to extract Hon Hai from their supply chains, and so far none are suggesting that is under consideration. Some Chinese analysts say the troubles at Hon Hai illustrate a need for change in how factory workers are treated. Hon Hai 'is a microcosm of China's labor system,' said Guo Yuhua, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

苹果(Apple Inc.)、惠普(Hewlett-Packard Co.)等电子企业说，它们将调查重要供应商鸿海精密工业股份有限公司(Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.)针对一连串员工自杀事件采取的应对措施。自杀事件使这家亚洲制造业巨头受到前所未有的拷问，也凸显了中国制造业劳动力群体发生的变化。

苹果、惠普等公司周三发表的声明是鸿海客户第一次对自杀事件公开置评。鸿海也被人以其商标名称“富士康”(Foxconn)相称，总部位于台湾，由郭台铭于1974年创立，按收入计算是世界上最大的电子产品外包商。它为苹果组装iPad和MacBook，也为戴尔(Dell Inc.)和诺基亚(Nokia Corp.)等品牌组装电脑等电子产品。

苹果方面说，我们对富士康近期的自杀事件感到悲伤和不安。苹果还说，它已指派一个团队评估鸿海处理自杀事件的措施。这家位于加利福尼亚州Cupertino的公司说，它正在同鸿海的高级管理层接触，并相信他们在非常认真地应对这件事情。

世界最大的个人电脑生产商惠普说，它正在调查富士康可能与这些悲剧性事件相关的做法。戴尔的一位发言人说，任何有关戴尔供应链恶劣工作条件的报道都得到调查，并且如果得到证实，都采取恰当的措施。诺基亚说，我们已经同富士康接触，以保证只要有问题，这些问题都得到了发现和处理。

鸿海精密发生一系列自杀事件的深层原因并不简单。该公司及其子公司在中国大陆雇工约有82万人，其中45万位于龙华基地及附近的多个工厂内。考虑到中国整体的自杀率，鸿海精密的死亡率从统计学意义上讲并不突出，但短时间内接连发生自杀事件却非同寻常。这种自杀模式类似于心理学家所说的“群体自杀”，即一起自杀引起诸多盲目效仿者，这种现象通常发生在学校或年轻人聚集的群体中。

公众对鸿海精密员工自杀事件的关注不断上升，中国政府官员已宣布正在对此进行调查。但迄今当局一直未表明公司有过失。

劳工权益倡议人士说，这一系列的死亡事件表明鸿海精密对待员工的方式有问题。这里的工人基本工资为每月900元人民币(约132美元)，为法定最低工资，但大多数工人都加班，加班工资以小时计，为标准工资的1.5倍或更多。批评人士说，鸿海精密强迫或允许工人超时工作超过了法定加班时间，而且其军事化的严格管理及单调的工作环境对工人产生了过度压力。

不过劳工权益倡议人士也说，鸿海精密的工作环境好于中国大陆的许多工厂，近年来，工厂的工作条件持续改善。

鸿海精密说，该公司的薪酬及加班操作均符合当地的劳动法规定，并遵循电子行业公民联盟( Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition) 为全球电子产品供应商制定的行为准则。公司已采取了一系列防自杀措施，包括设立防自杀电话热线，聘请专家及顾问进行咨询，还邀请了僧人来厂做法事等。

总部位于纽约的中国劳工观察(China Labor Watch)的常务董事李强说，另一个问题是鸿海精密的龙华基地真是太大了。这些年轻工人觉得没有人关心他们。他说，鸿海精密的做法未能跟上龙华等沿海工厂雇用的民工的变化。

李强及中国其他学者与劳工专家们说，之前的上几代民工主要来自中国大陆贫穷的内地农村，对艰苦的农活习已为常，更专注于赚钱。而如今的年轻工人们对农村的认同感要差，更多意识到他们自身的艰苦生活与中国社会中的其他人拥有财富及舒适生活之间的差距。

上海华东师范大学的心理学教授李国瑞说，这一代民工与上几代民工很不一样，当代民工处于的这个时代，很容易通过手机、媒体及互联网获得信息。他们很容易知道其他同龄人的生活。如今的年轻工人不想成为赚钱的机器。

19岁的李海周二从一座培训中心的五楼窗户跳楼身亡后，警方找到了一封遗书，信中他向亲人表示了歉意。新华社援引警方的话报导，遗书中称其自杀是因为心理压力大，感到现实与其对前途的期望差距较大，兼之家庭因素等原因，失去生活信心。

尽管劳动维权人士称龙华是“血汗工厂”，它看起来却丝毫不像这个词语让人联想起的小说家狄更斯笔下的肮脏悲惨。周三，数千名工人身穿带彩色制服、戴着身份识别卡，走在绿树成荫的路上，其他人则在提供各种地方菜的食堂里用餐。

该厂设有一个医院、一间书店，还有数不尽的低矮厂房。一个横幅上宣传的是公司卡拉OK比赛。22岁的员工刘日胜（音）站在餐厅外，吸着烟，他说压力是可以控制的。他说，人们时不时地抱怨，不过对我的影响并不大。

鸿海的文化是围绕着郭台铭的个性建立起来的。郭台铭是借母亲的钱生产电视频道转换钮起家，而去年鸿海发展已经成为一个收入达600多亿美元的大型企业。郭台铭将强力驱策与军事化领导风格融合在一起。2007年他少有地接受了《华尔街日报》的采访，他说成吉思汗是他的个人英雄，还说他恨自己成名了。

鸿海的失误令一系列自杀事件引发的不良舆论雪上加霜。郭台铭周三宣布，该公司将在未来几周内在建筑物周围设置150万平方米的安全网，此话被讽说明公司预计会有更多的跳楼事件。郭台铭还被迫在前一天晚上公开收回了一封被一些人视为麻木不仁的致员工信。

苹果公司过去曾因鸿海的问题而陷入争议。2006年，有媒体报导龙华工人待遇差，苹果随之派出了一个调查组。调查组发现了数起违反《供应商行为守则》的行为，包括工人工作时间超过了建议的每周60小时，不过调查组说整体上讲鸿海在大部分方面符合它的规定。苹果继续定期检查该工厂，对其他供应商也是如此。

这样的检查通常包括察看设施，与员工面谈，这些公司说这是为了让员工不受到管理层的胁迫。各公司很难把鸿海从它们的供应链中去除，目前为止，尚没有公司表示正在考虑这样做。一些中国分析人士说，鸿海的问题凸显出工厂工人的待遇急需改善。清华大学教授郭于华说，鸿海是中国劳动体制的一个缩影。