Stories like this make me want to move forward with Shop Conscious, a pet project I’ve been mulling for 2 years now:
According to reports, dozens of workers at a Chinese factory that assembles Xbox 360 consoles threatened to jump off a dormitory roof. The rooftop protest began on Jan 2, following plans to close the Xbox assembly line, with workers saying that Foxconn reneged on a promise to compensate anyone wanting to leave.
While an incident of this scale is unusual, suicides at Foxconn factories are far from unheard of. A suicide cluster in 2010 saw 14 deaths, with workers throwing themselves from the tops of the company’s buildings. Last year employees were asked to sign a ‘no suicide’ pact in response to the rise in suicides, and the company unveiled plans to install safety nets around its buildings, to keep workers from jumping to their deaths.
Greg Palmer 