Today is one of those days I just have to go home having not understood the world.
That happens a lot when it comes to Foxconn. Allow me some bullet points:
* World’s largest manufacturer.
* Hundreds of thousands of employees, evidently around 920,000.
* Almost all the factory workers are young men and women from rural areas who come to live in factory dorms and work long hours.
* Those long hours are spent building electronics YOU OWN. Phones, computers, gaming stuff, iPads, Kindles, you name it.
* They’ve had a rash of suicides, mostly involving young people jumping from the roofs of the dormitories.
* They put up nets at some of the dorms, someone jumped anyway, died anyway.
* The company started handing out huge raises to workers but also announced plans to pull out of cities where those raises were necessary to retain workers. Instead, the company is moving a lot of operations to rural areas where those workers are from and where they can pay lower wages.
* This week they held a rally to improve worker morale and to sort of, I guess, campaign against suicide…? And at that rally, some guys were dressed as Spiderman and THE INTERNET WON’T TELL ME WHY.
* I can’t even show you the Spiderman costumes due to rights issues. So go see them here. Then come back and explain why these dudes were dressed as Spiderman.
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