Journalism, Stupidity and the iPhone

Perhaps you've heard, Verizon is joining the iPhone craze. It seems as if AT&T got a pretty big headstart. But with the mi-fi feature that Verizon is offering... well, we'll see.

The announcement did remind me of an articile I read in infoworld a few months ago titled, Suicide, Stupidity and the iPhone.

The eye catching summation is, “Factory workers who can't stand to crank out even one more iPhone are killing themselves, while cell phone users careen about the highways”.

In the article, Bill Snyder tells of a city-like factory complex in Shenzhen, China housing 250,000 employees. The factory makes iPhones, iPads and other consumer electronics, apparently of the computer variety. However, the real news is the bleak conditions. Bleak conditions driven by the American consumer’s desire to get cool devices “cheap”.

This story says that the factory made $2.3B last year but only paid employees about $300 per month. I’m not sure how those two numbers relate to each other but this would indicate that payroll for the factory approached $1B. Ok. So what’s the point? That the factory should pay its workers more? I realize that Wikipedia isn’t particularly authoritative but I searched them anyway. I found out that per capita income for the People’s Republic of China is approximately $3600 per year. So, assuming that there are some rather wealthy Chinese, whose income is quite a bit greater than $3600/year, that would indicate that these employees earn an income greater than the Chinese mean. Is that a “bleak” condition?

Further, this story says that conditions are so bad at this complex that, horror of horrors, 10 people have committed suicide so far this year. I decided to take upon myself the role that Snyder labels, “apologist” and did a little more research. ChinaToday.com says that in 2008, there were 260,000 suicides in China. In 2008, the World Bank reported Chinese population at ~1.3 billion. That puts the suicide rate in China at .02%. The suicide rate at the factory appears to be approximately .008% (assuming 10  suicides for the first half of the year and 10 for the second half). So, we have a suicide rate that is less than half of the overall rate in China. Statistically, that’s a larger gap than the “slightly lower than that of the country as a whole” that Snyder suggests. I suppose that’s because the conditions at this complex are so horrible.

Additionally, Snyder says that all of these suicides occur at work rather than at home, so “there's obviously a link between the work environment and the deaths”. However, in his description of the “city-like factory complex”, he says that employees live in “dorms on the complex grounds”. Do suicides in the dorms count as “at home” or “at work”. He doesn’t say. But, it may be that the link between the work environment and the suicides isn’t quite as obvious as he indicates.

I'm not sure if this is just lousy reporting or just another anti-business, anti-free market, anti-consumer screed. Either way, I think I'm beginning to understand the “Stupidity” portion of Mr. Snyder's article.