Foxconn’s recent move to more than doubling the salaries of their factory workers was a good first step in stopping the cycle of suicides that has plagues the Chinese electronics manufacturer over the past six months… but the gesture was a bit muted by Foxconn’s policy of compensating the families of suicide victims by almost ten years’ salary. It incentivized self-murder, and the cash payout can be traced as the reason of at least one jumper’s death.
Yesterday, in a wise move announced at their annual shareholder meeting, Foxconn announced they would be discontinuing the compensation scheme. It’s about time, although Foxconn themselves were reluctant to lay the blame on the feet of their compensation scheme: instead, they predictably blamed the media for inspiring copycats.
At the same meeting, the company also announced that it will be relocating a good chunk of their manufacturing work, largely due to the worsened earnings forecast prompted by their recent wage increases. Basically, it sounds like Foxconn — sick of employees and their easily frayed psyches getting in the way of their bottom line — want to do what they can to get rid of them entirely: they plan to build a fully automated facility in either Taiwan or Vietnam.
In the meantime, Foxconn will be shifting some orders to Vietnam to reduce workload in their Chinese factories, although this move supposedly won’t result in any layoffs.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
