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Reading through the poems, one in particular stood out to me, ‘A screw Fell to the Ground.’ While it was done eight months before his suicide, the context seems to be relatable to how he may have been feeling—mostly the sound of “someone” plunging and nobody hearing.

—

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 "A Screw Fell to the Ground"

一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw fell to the ground

在这个加班的夜晚 In this dark night of overtime

垂直降落，轻轻一响 Plunging vertically, lightly clinking

不会引起任何人的注意 It won’t attract anyone’s attention

就像在此之前 Just like last time

某个相同的夜晚 On a night like this

有个人掉在地上 When someone plunged to the ground

-- 9 January 2014

I really liked that one as well, but I don't like the fact that the translator translated "掉在地上" differently between the first and final lines, which are meant to mirror each other exactly in order to juxtapose the fate of a screw with the fate of a man. Neither were to receive any embellishments. They both simply fell or dropped.

Here's my take:

A screw fell to the ground

On a night of overtime

Straight down, a gentle clink

Nobody noticed

Just like last time

On a night not unlike this one

A person fell to the ground

Here's my version! The only regret is the "man", which in Chinese should be "person", but "person" has always seemed so poetically dead, to my sense.

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 A Screw Drops

一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw drops

在这个加班的夜晚 In this overtime night

垂直降落，轻轻一响 The straight fall, the light clink

不会引起任何人的注意 That draws no one's attention.

就像在此之前 Just as once before

某个相同的夜晚 On a similar night

有个人掉在地上 A man dropped.

Geez, that poem really hits me in the gut.
Poor soul had reached such of level of desperation that his digestion of self was like a duplicate object of industry. But as we may seem as copies of the same...we’re not. We are beings experiencing a reality through the scope of a subjective view. It’s all a matter of perspective.
According to some initial Googling, it looks like Foxconn had one year where 14 people committed suicide out of nearly one million workers (2010, their worst year for suicides). The general suicide rate in China is about 22 in 100,000. Seems like the Foxconn suicide rate is significantly lower, right? Or am I looking at the numbers wrong?
You can't compare a corporation's suicide rate to a nation's because corporations filter out people through their hiring process.

You have to compare foxconn's suicide rate to other corporations.

Maybe the emphasis is too much on the suicides. It seems like the concern is not just about the suicide rate, but the general working conditions and lack of freedom in China, in Shenzhen, and at Foxconn. Here's a pro-labor take on the challenges workers are facing on China and efforts to suppress reporting about these challenges [1]. The suicides (at Foxconn, in China, and around the world) are exacerbated by poor economic conditions [2].

China also has a lower suicide rate than the US even [3] although I'd be skeptical of underreporting, given China's low press freedom ranking (176 out of 180 [4]) and low "human freedom" ranking [5]. It's speculation but worth considering that things may be worse on the ground than what's being reported.

[1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/condition-working-cl... [2] https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-healt... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r... [4] https://rsf.org/en/ranking [5] https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index

Unlike the Foxconn workers, those 22 were not all young, healthy, and employed. You are comparing different demographics.
My reasoning is that it's similar to student suicides that occur on university campuses - although the overall suicide rate by percentage is often much lower than the regional/national average, the topic of conversation is situated on what environmental conditions may be significant causes or factors for those suicides, whether it be student stress/mental health or hostile overwork.
I think you'd need to look at these adjusted by population, for instance well employed people in a certain area
You were probably never even looking at the correct figures. Given the track record of Chinese government at concealing the truth because it's deemed a threat to national security, how are they going to convince people this number is grossly understated?

If you cry you saw winnie the pooh irl, the 3rd or 4th time, people are gonna ask questions and demand you provide an independent inquiry led by a coalition of developed democracies.

These are some remarkable poems. I feel lucky that someone took the time to translate and share these poems on the internet where they can find a wider audience.
What can I tell as an industry insider.

Foxconn was known for giving above market range remuneration, and in addition was very welcoming to "party crashers." Not only they gave high salaries, but also liveable dorms, on-site catering, campus hospital and etc. And they were eager to hire everybody who came to their doorsteps without ever asking for guy's papers (In China, your resume is an official document.)

Downside: zero progression beyond a team lead after few years, unless the worker would have be super duper lucky to be selected for training in on-site college.

Foxconn fortunes turned south few years ago, when it became obvious that domestic companies surpassed them on salary scale. A salary for a machinist with 5 years experience begins at net 10000 CNY a month, and 15k is closer to the median. Foxconn would've never ever gave anybody on the production line 10k a month.

Foxconn is now the "rubber sandals factory" of the electronics world — they can't move up the value chain because anybody with brains run away from them the moment they save enough cash to move up.

I hope this makes people reconsider if they really need a new laptop, iphone, etc. I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.
> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.

A lot of America has traded their old Main Street for a Walmart shopping complex the next town over. Now they're upgrading that to an Amazon distribution center in the next state over.

On this board, I expect a lot of people will explain (unsympathetically but not completely unreasonably) that the benefits of these exploitative conditions outweigh the costs (this unfortunate soul's death included).

I think you can have reasonably priced quality products and worker well-being, but good luck making your case to shareholders and their apologists.

I think you're overly optimistic about how little people care about price.

I'd argue that if you could halve the price by literally using slaves to manufacturer them, most people wouldn't care as long as those slaves were on the other side of the planet.

I hope people would actually do some research before biting on the clickbait. Foxconn has a lower suicide rate than the national average, and compared to working conditions in most of China is virtually first world.

If you want to see REAL human suffering, look to something like the shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh.

Consider what those “exploited” workers would be doing if enough fewer people bought iPhones for their labor not to be needed. Would they be better off than they are now?

Presumably they are not being held against their will, so this is the best job they could find.

Low-skilled factory labor is a worse job than sitting in a Silicon Valley office all day, but it’s probably better than rural poverty or unemployment.

> I think a lot of people would pay twice as much for their devices if they could guarantee the workers weren't being exploited.

It's interesting that we think in terms of what extra amount we would pay.

Apple commands the highest profit margins in the industry per device manufactured which is in part due to the negotiated labor costs it pays to companies like Foxconn.

Why not instead ask Apple to pay more for labor instead?

They already go out of their way to source recycled materials and conflict free materials. Is it so hard to expect them to pay or ask their ODMs to pay living wage labor costs with favorable working conditions?

Doubt it. Didn’t happen with rubber. Didn’t happen with chocolate. Didn’t happen with Californian tomatoes. Technology will press the exploitation out when you don’t need people.
Progress is incremental. A Foxconn worker has a much higher standard of living than his father who worked in a toy factory. His father had a higher standard of living than his grandparents who were subsistence farmers. This wouldn't happen if everyone had to pay twice as much for devices.
Part of the problem, for developers, is that build toolchains are a garbage heap of hacks that get slower and slower.

So you need crazier and crazier laptops to support the containers and IDEs and transpilation and asset pipelines and all that.

I code on a 5 year old laptop very happily. But the only reason I can do that is I code close to raw language, with a minimal build chain. I expressly design my software to need less support.

Most pros don’t have that luxury. It’s incorporate the new hotness or we won’t be able to attract the cheap devs fresh out of school.

You're dead wrong, unfortunately. I was just in a thread on a Tesla forum about a wireless phone charger kit, and people were bragging about cancelling their order from one place that sold it for $x in order to buy it from another place that ripped it off and sold it for $y.

There were justifications, of course. "oh, they're all made in the same factory anyway". "company A probably didn't even design it in the first place, they just want you think they did. It's all marketing". "They didn't lower the price when they removed this one component that's no longer needed".

These are all people who don't need the gadget in the first place, and can easily afford to pay the higher price for it. In fact, they were going to in the first place, before the cheaper option came along. They think they're wise consumers. They think they got a bargain. They think you're a sucker if you "overpay".

Lots of caveats, sure. I have no idea who designed the product. Maybe they're both ripoffs of someone else's part. Maybe they are built in the same factory. Maybe the only difference is who is making a huge profit off the markup, and how much they're making off of it.

But the point stands. People want to pay as little as possible, they feel virtue in that, and they'll invent reasons to justify paying less, no matter what.

What am I supposed to do as the consumer. Am I to not buy new electronics at all in protest? If 10,000 of us were to do this do you think the drop in revenue would be attributed to dissatisfaction with the working conditions instead of underperformance in sales and marketing?

If there was a way for me to paypal $20 to the employees myself on top of a new iPhone there could but its not something that consumers have much control over and I am skeptical that just using outdated devices addresses the situation

Individual consumption choices definitely matter [1], but working alongside others in your workplace and community is even more impactful. It's a longterm bet, but if you start talking with others around you about their own conditions, I think people will eventually start to see the parallels. Imagine if American workers refused to support trade deals unless they included rights for workers as part of them, for example. But it starts with recognizing that the people around us are in the same boat.

[1] I am currently resisting buying an iPhone XS even though I really want one, because I'm trying to work on mine.

This looks like a hunt for culprits, even if such course of action does not make much sense. Please be aware that these are suicides, not murders. The workers, even the suicidal ones, are free and self-responsible people, presumed to be capable of taking care of themselves and their life, which includes their physical and mental health. Here's a dull, yet important word of advice for everyone: be aware and caring of yourself as a living person and don't hesitate to change course if your current path leads to misery of any kind, let alone to (premature) death.
Companies just won't advertise that they are made using exploitative conditions. The 'ethically made' technology label will have the same fate as organic, fair trade, etc. type labels: it will be priced out of reach for the vast majority of consumers.

Those in silicon valley with their Model 3 and sustainable earwax-based soaps will rave about their latest ethical laptops, while the rest of the country saves up income for years to buy the cheapest new model computer available and strives to make it work as long as possible. Most consumers are already well priced out of paying more for preference or good conscious.

Call me cynical but most of the populous has an amazing ability to turn a blind eye when they’re benefiting from it in some way.
It would have to be enforced by regulations or law. No different than child labor laws and overtime compensation laws. Businesses, shareholders, do not care about worker exploitation.

And if prices double, it's plausible sales drop to one quarter what they are now, and the problem gets even worse.

If all the technology just went away and these people went back to working in the fields, because they had no other choice, would that be better? Maybe it would be less stressful but they'd also make less money. Maybe they're worse off from having the choice. Maybe they're not entirely responsible for making this choice because of deception, the trap that is earning more than your peers but still not being wealthy enough to ever quit.

Unfortunately, like with clothes, paying 10ntimes as much would still not guarantee this.
These poems are heartbreaking to read. It seems to expose something fundamental about the working conditions for so many Chinese laborers. The science-fiction reader in me can't help but feel like these poems represent a certain kind of dystopia realized.
In a similar vein there’s also this book called “An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830s-1850s” whose title says it all. It can be read online through Google Books at this link: https://books.google.ro/books/about/An_Anthology_of_Chartist...
But other companies can build their phones without such appalling working conditions? Don't they?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

This has depressed me...not just because of this guy's brilliant poems and the potential within, but because there doesn't seem to be an end in sight for any of this suffering.

Even if you don't personally buy laptops or phones, companies like Google/Amazon etc. are buying them on your behalf to put in the "cloud". There's really not much average people can do to stop this.

China is definitely extreme but you don't have to go too far to see overworked people, it's much more common in the US than people realize. Everyone is overworked. I think that Starbucks got popular partially due to this.
I think one lesson that be learnt from this sad story is that when you feel you are trapped in a depressing job or place, think of change, take the courage to pack up and leave for a new job or place. Don't be passive and endure the same depression over and over.
A competing factory is using really hardcore AI to coerce people to do this kind of thing. Some people can see through worlds. I spotted this as soon as this made the front-page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561326

Similar discussion from about 2 years earlier. I think that we react and reflect similarly is a good thing, though I've no clue how conditions changed overall in this time.

Foxconn employs almost a million people. When you compare the rate of suicides among it's employees to rate of suicide in China as a whole, there's no significant difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides#Analysis

May be this statistic is forged somehow, of course - but all the media pieces I read about Foxconn suicides don't even try to gather up meaningful analysis, blaming all suicides on the company instead.

This adequately describes my life and job, except I stare at invoices all day entering similar information day in, day out, submittimg electronic data to a handful of government agencies for twelve and a half years now. I'm basically a piece of OCR software that's told to sit there, be quiet, be perfect, if you call in sick we're holding it against you, no you can't take time off that month is blacked out, no you don't need a cost of living raise, produce produce produce! I'll regularly just zone out for who knows how long, usually snapping back to the world when my head starts to dip or my eyes go unfocused enough to start to cause discomfort. Realizing, this is my 'life' and likely will be until I die.

--

《我就那样站着入睡》 "I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That"

and

"My Life’s Journey is Still Far from Complete"

hit way too close to home. You'd think my life would be drastically different in midwest America. I'm not standing at an assembly line, I didn't have to leave my home town to go far away to a factory, but I really am expected to be more machine than man. I'm expected to sit at a desk, not talk, limit my trips to the bathroom, limit getting up with the exception of the 2 daily parades of 2 laps around the office that are done as a group, if you're sick you're expected to be at work unless dying although every cold and flu season corporate stressed "if you're sick stay home" ha! Everything is about efficiency and production, merit-based increases rarely cover cost of living increases, I get 5 weeks of vacation a year but blocks of time get blacked out and we work any holiday that's on a weekday while local management (and most definitely corporate) is at home with their families.

I saw Office Space in theaters when I was 14. I thought it was satire. Oh how wrong I was. It is life. Actually, it's better than life.

While I enjoy the luxuries of sitting and, sometimes working HVAC (it was in the 80's in my office most of the summer), I do highly repetitive work that is effectively data entry that in 5, 10, 15 years OCR software will do the bulk of. Want to advance? Well, you better have a 4-6 year degree and be willing to move to other states multiple times to earn an extra 10-20%. Want to get sick? Do it on your own time. Want to take a vacation with your family? Ehhhh we'll see but don't count on it. Want to enjoy a holiday away from work? Hahahaha better be one of the few people that get drawn to have it off. Want a raise? Ok you can have a merit based increase once a year, if you were sick you get less, if you made a few errors each month while trying to make unrealistic production standards you get less, weren't cheerful enough based on your manager's arbitrary determination you get a little less...

I come on sites like HN, Reddit, even Facebook. I hear people talk about their jobs. I hear people bitch that the company retreat wasn't at some place cool this year, I hear people complain they only get 2 months of maternity/paternity leave, I hear them whine how oh boo hoo they have to work 4 more years at their job to be able to be FIRE (ha, I will have to work until the day I die, cry me a river), I hear that tens of thousands had the luxury of walking out of work to protest sexual harassment policy when I can't call in without a doctor's note or it counts against me and even with a doctor's note I know it's going to shave several tenths of a percent off of my MAYBE 2.6% merit-based increase on my annual review.

Damn Foxconn employees, I feel you. Oh how I feel you.

I have like 30 tabs open from things I promised I'd return and read (until an accidental closing of the browser saves me from these obligations). But as I began to read through this, I could not stop.

Xu's poems are remarkable. A creative soul trapped inside, and eventually swallowed by, the meaningless pit of capitalism.

我被它们治得服服贴贴 They've trained me to become docile

我不会呐喊，不会反抗 Don't know how to shout or rebel

不会控诉，不会埋怨 How to complain or denounce

只默默地承受着疲惫 Only how to silently suffer exhaustion

While being a peasant is in no way desirable, at least you don't have to sell your soul pretending that a life spent serving a gigantic corporation in return for scraps is desirable.

Most work is simply absurd - a place of drudgery and despair. We can say that while still accepting that it beats poverty.

The poetry is so beautiful. One day I was in a park and stopped at a spot that had so many trees and the sunlight was streaking through the leaves and the tree branches. It was extremely beautiful. I felt a strong urge to hug the tree and weep. I left all this for a life in a gray cubicle and the human ant hill.
this sort of suffering is unfortunately necessary and endemic to capitalism, conscientious consumerism or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
I "worked" at the Xingda Hongye PCB factory in Zhongshan for a month. They let me stay in the factory dormitory and eat in the cafeteria for free, but didn't pay me.

It was good! Afterwards I got a job in Shenzhen that paid, so I moved. But the Xingda workers were from all over China, each with fascinating stories, and very happy to meet a foreigner.

I wish I could go back there now. I just finished 4 years working at a microSD card company in Taiwan. I've been trying to find a job since March; unemployed since August. I've given up on my dreams, and I'll take anything. I don't even know how to apply for jobs now. The only two interviews I had were from people who already worked in the company telling their HR to talk to me. Recruiters are ignoring me. Prayer hasn't worked. Sharing side projects on HN hasn't worked. Please tell me the email address of someone who can give me food and shelter.

> We hope that in the future, workers in Foxconn and elsewhere manage to find ways around such companies' military-style discipline and surveillance, come together, and forge collective paths out of this capitalist world of death, into a world worth living in.

Are they aware that China is a communist country?

Shocked, but pleasantly so to see this on HN.
Dear Apple or like,

Please commemorate the life and death of this workers on your products, advertising and software. This could, maybe, change our reasoning about the supply chain.